Repeat All Chile

17 March – 27 April 2007
Repeat All is a travelling exhibition that started in Switzerland in September 2006. It arrived in Santiago de Chile to be presented from March to April 2007 at the Matucana 100 cultural centre, with the curatorship of Sigismond de Vajay, founder of the Toit du Monde cultural centre in Vevey, and with the general coordination of Carolina Olivares, both co-founders of KBB in Barcelona.

Repeat All is designed as a tour of 12 video installations or intimate spaces, with the idea of representing, through international video works from the last five years, a vast panorama of proposals with contents of excellent artistic and production quality. The approach used in the selected works has been to confront narrative, contemplative or simply radical works.

The diverse origins of the participating artists allows the confrontation of different cultures and their dialectics of influence, providing a broader vision, both in geographical and narrative terms. In this sense, each artist has used his or her own language and has narrated various events of both political and cultural contingency, whether incorporating new technologies or reflecting real and complex behaviours with classical themes.

The exhibition includes the work of the following artists: Carlos Amorales (Mexico), Alejandro Vidal (Spain), Hassan Khan (Egypt), Sanna Kannisto (Finland), PinkTwins (Finland), Jordi Colomer (Spain), Santiago Sierra (Spain), John Bock (Germany), El Perro (Spain), Muntean/Rosenblum (Austria/Israel), Sean Snyder (USA), Solmaz Shahbazi (Iran).

Details about the exhibited works 
“Porzellan Isoschizo Küchentat des neurodermitischen Brockenfalls im Kaffeestrudel und das alles ganz teuer” by the German artist John Bock is an energetic and overloaded video represented by a performance starring the same artist, in a clear and precise way. The viewer enters a world that is stressed and tidal due to the amount of information received at high speed.

“Disco” by the artist couple Muntean/Rosenblum slowly and narratively explores a contemporary situation with historical references. A shipwreck of youth in a minimal scenario, concentrating the misery of a human void with the hope of a better future.

“Splitter” by the Finnish brothers PinkTwins, is the only abstract work presented by Repeat All, which acts as a link with new technologies, transforming normal images into an intense and profound pictorial abstraction using software programmed by the artists themselves.

In a totally different direction, the works of Sean Snyder, Hassan Khan, Solmaz Shahbazi and Jordi Colomer have a relationship with the south and the north, presenting situations and viewpoints in different ways.

Sean Snyder, for example, investigates through a documentary, the power of brands and globalization in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hassan Khan presents a selection of 7 mono-channel videos that relate to the city of Cairo.

Solmaz Shahbazi presents, through her didactic and minimalist documentary, the urbanizations of the rich in Istanbul; and Jordi Colomer brings a long, fresh and colorful journey through Yemen, where the irony of globalized culture is reflected through a series of characters representing their idols, who are curiously all or almost all Westerners. All these works reflect intense discourses with totally different rhythms.

“Tactical Disorder” by Alejandro Vidal and “Carabanchel Sound System” by the former Spanish collective El Perro , renamed “Democracia”, are works that reflect in a more evident way the tendencies of the video clip, reinterpreting the aesthetics of this kind of process. In each of these works, there is some detail that differentiates it from a traditional commercial video clip, placing these proposals in a political and radical urban position.