From June 14 to September 16, 2018, On Working And Then Not Working, a solo exhibition by Armando Andrade Tudela curated by Elfi Turpin.
Putting together an exhibition with Armando Andrade Tudela is like undertaking a trepanation. It's making a hole in the artist's head and inserting our fingers. Opening up his work to take the pressure off. Cutting a doorway into an artist's system and sending him off down new roads to adventure. A delicate, archaic, ironic business. This trepanation is also a way of escaping a kind of exhibition bureaucracy bent on petrifying works we'd like to keep in a critical state until they tip over into the categories—sculpture, painting, photography, film, tool, furniture—that dichotomize studio practice and conceptual practice, North and South, hand and head. Trepanation's a ruse. There are others.
Putting together an exhibition with Armando Andrade Tudela is working and then not working. It's experiencing a transition—the moment when "The sun refused to set or, no, the Earth refused to move so that the sun could set, yes."* It's conceiving a space-time in which, in order to preserve them from that fixed mode of existence, the works are maintained in a kind of ambiguity, a process of transformation or of adaptation to paradoxical desires. Whether speaking to Peruvian modernity, European empathy, the pressure of things on the body or the traumatising effects of the academic, the work endlessly eludes any univocal approach, offering itself, instead, to oblique scrutiny from both sides of the Ocean.
—Elfi Turpin, May 2018.
* Alan Dugan, Poems Seven: New Poems and Complete Poetry (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001).
On Working And Then Not Working is conceived in collaboration with CA2M - Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Madrid), which will propose a second iteration of the exhibition curated by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané and opening on February 22, 2019, to be accompanied by a publication.
