Liliana Porter: El hombre con el hacha y otras situaciones breves

“El hombre con el hacha y otras situaciones breves – Venecia 2017” is one of Liliana Porter’s most ambitious projects to date for its scale and complexity: the piece contains many of the characters, groupings, or situations that have appeared repeatedly in Porter’s works over the last three decades and takes its name from the tiny figure of a man with an axe, shown hacking away at an elongated pile of fragmented objects. The viewer’s eye follows this array of broken pieces and  will notice several old clocks of varying sizes – central to Porter’s practice is an investigation of time and how its passage blurs the line between reality and imagination. Historical figures and symbols appear throughout the installation as representations of past ideologies and historical positions coexisting in the same space.