IN/SITU

Installed within the expansive, vaulted architecture of Navy Pier’s Festival Hall, IN/SITU features large-scale sculpture, video, film and site-specific works. For the 2023 program, Claudia Segura, Curator of Exhibitions and Collection at MACBA, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, curated a selection of new and existing works featuring artists from leading international exhibitors participating in the exposition.

2023 IN/SITU Curator

Claudia Segura (Barcelona, 1984) is a curator and cultural producer based in Barcelona, where she is Curator of Exhibitions and Collection at MACBA, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

She holds a BA from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths University, London. She was Director and Chief Curator of NC-arte in Bogotá, Colombia (2015—2019), where she curated several exhibitions and site-specific projects by different artists (Amalia Pica, Luis Camnitzer, Xavier Le Roy, Nicolás Paris, Nicolás Consuegra, Los Carpinteros, Alia Farid, among others). She was coordinator of cultural initiatives at the Fundació ”la Caixa”, Barcelona (2010—2012); an external curator of the Mardin Biennial, Turkey (2014—2015); and mentor of the Sala d’Art Jove, Barcelona (2014), and at the Cano Laboratory at the Art Museum of the National University of Colombia (2018). In addition, she has been a visiting lecturer at the National University of the Andes, Bogotá (2017).

Segura has curated and co-curated projects including To be known as Infinite: María José Arjona, MAMBO, Bogotá (2018); Here the border is you, ProyectosLA, Los Angeles (2017); Límites Nómadas, Biennial of the Borders of Mexico (2015); Fifty (Pipilotti Rist) from Han Nefkens H+F Collection, Collectorspace, Istanbul (2014); Copy/Paste – Recodifying the gesture, Instituto Cervantes, London; Like Tears in Rain, Palace of the Arts, Porto; and Producing Urban Order, Goldsmiths University, London (2008).

She was editorial coordinator of Florae 2015 magazine of Flora ars + natura, Bogotá and writes regularly for diverse, specialized arts platforms. Segura is part of various research platforms such as De vuelta y vuelta and Para abrir boca.

CURATORIAL STATEMENT: Y el mar tomó la palabra (And the sea spoke), IN/SITU 2023

Y el mar tomó la palabra (And the sea spoke)

To the territory of the non-memory

The realm of the moving potential of that which is not…

To the state beyond the image-reach

The magic cosmo-life of Myth and Fantasy

I speak and say “Welcome”

-The Image Reach (1980), Sun Ra

Through a decolonial perspective, Y el mar tomó la palabra (And the sea spoke) employs the poetic and the political potential of fabulation, or fable-telling, to speculate on how artists perceive the future and the ancient past, and become entangled in the cyclical nature of civilization. Nature becomes a crucial component of this storytelling, not just as a tangible territory, but also a mindset. The exhibition includes the unknown, the stories underlying the dominant history, and narratives pulled from the natural elements that surround us.

Magic, myth, and fantasy make up the fables through which the landscape becomes a character with its own subjectivity, which speculates on a situated knowledge and cries out for an appraisal of the ways it has been used and abused. This proposal invites us to embrace the different cultural beliefs and symbolisms concealed in the landscape and in the home it implies. It is a question not just of seeing nature as an element in transit between the fictional and the real, the spiritual and the earthly, but of that which is neither seen nor known. Willing to expand like a vast tongue in the territory, it has the capacity to reconstruct its own memory.

“Those things never happen in histr’y, an’ even if they did, histr’y ain’t got eyes to see everything.”

-George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin, 1953

History often lies in customs, in words, in trades, in the sea and the mountains, in proverbs and legends, in intangible memory, in native songs and popular dances, in the imaginaries evoked by the land, in absence and in void, and in noises and silences. Just like the ebbing and flowing of the sea, endlessly creating its sediments and its relief, history relentlessly accumulates these deposits, converting them into narratives of consensus and dissent. Oralities related to specific ecosystems are also important in the construction of this polyphonic approach, by evoking silenced voices with a need to speak or heal.

And the sea spoke is constructed as a platform where the notion of collectivity is built on the poetic dialogues between species, objects, and elements. These entities call for a diversity of narrators capable of building a body of intangible knowledge.

The selection presented at IN/SITU this year requires a physical reading that forces spectators to meet their own bodies and understand the oeuvre as an(other) organism that challenges their own. The large-scale proposals, suspended sculptures and site-specific works—as well as the more intimate practices that activate the architecture of Navy Pier—set out to stimulate an almost corporeal turbulence that seeks to highlight performative understandings of our knowledge. And the sea spoke is an attempt to recover vulnerable, mutilated, mutable, dreamy stories, narratives that appeal to the construction of new material assemblies interweaving thought, memory, and nature.

2023 Participating Artists

2023 ON-SITE WORKS

Carlos Alfonso
Casas Riegner, Bogotá
Mundos mutuos, 2020

Ink on paper (Tinta sobre papel)

Photo by Cheri Eisenberg.

Richard Bell
OSMOS, New York
Emory Douglas, 2023

Synthetic polymer paint on canvas. 94 x 70 in. Courtesy of the artist, Milani Gallery, Meanjin / Brisbane, OSMOS, New York.

Photo by Mario Gallucci.

Julien Creuzet
DOCUMENT; Chicago, Lisbon
cross of the depths pains elsewhere they asked me to swallow my tongue swallow salt water, never to say again what we are going to say in a round Legba (...), 2021.

Plastic, metal, fabric. 108 1/4 x 46 1/8 x 29 1/8 in.

Photo by Cheri Eisenberg.

Plastic, metal, fabric. 108 1/4 x 46 1/8 x 29 1/8 in. Collection of Steve Corkin and Dan Maddalena.

Photo by Cheri Eisenberg and Jeff Ellis.

Plastic, metal, fabric. 108 x 51 x 7 in. Collection of Trissa Babrowski and Sundeep Mullangi.

Photo by Cheri Eisenberg and Jeff Ellis.

Julien Creuzet
DOCUMENT; Chicago, Lisbon
it's a sad day in Morne à l'eau volcano body volcano tumor mood blood pool fucking sweet half moon damn black rotten banana today no more smile do you like my english banana factory, pesticide in my mother's chest checkmate tropical hospital will you heal in peace container ship in the middle of the cluster cluster body bark terror will you transport my ocean racher, tout du dedans bien pris en dedans racher, tout tout tou pris dans le dedans (Martinique), 2021

Laser Cut Steel. 87 2/8 x 133 7/8 in.

Julien Creuzet
DOCUMENT; Chicago, Lisbon
Long chimney path, long palm path, fortunately we are walking, fortunately we are who we are standing. Oh beautiful parrot, 2021

Carbon steel. 139 x 164 in.

Jeanne Gaigher
Southern Guild, Cape Town
Dimensions of a Dialogue II, 2022

Collage on canvas. 118.11 x 196.85 in.

Photo by Mario Gallucci.

Andrea Galvani
CURRO, Guadalajara
Instruments for Inquiring into the Wind and the Shaking Earth, 2022

Neon, white and cobalt-blue hand-blown Murano glass, handmade metal structures, concrete bases. Dimensions variable with architecture.

Photo by Mario Gallucci.

Paul Mignard
Galerie Poggi, Paris
Bliss, 2023

Pigments on free canvas. 78.74016 x 212.598 in. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Poggi, Paris.

Photo by Mario Gallucci.

Ebony G. Patterson
moniquemeloche, Chicago
...pink...red...striped..carnations..., 2021-22

Digital print on archival watercolor paper with hand-cut and torn elements, construction paper, plastic, feathers, resin, and acrylic mounted on wallpaper in two parts. 114 x 192 x 15 in (installation). 98 x 190 x 15 in (frame).

Photo by Mario Gallucci.

Sun Ra
Corbett Vs. Dempsey, Chicago
Album cover with vinyl poems

Cover design for Sun Ra's LP When Sun Comes Out (Saturn Records, 1963). 240 x 144 in. Courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey and the Estate of Sun Ra.

Photo by Mario Gallucci.

Carlos Rolón
Hexton, Aspen
NO ME JODAS, 2023

Cotton Yarn, Enamel and Fabric on Repurposed Polyethylene Tarp. 68 x 68 in.
Photo by Cheri Eisenberg.

Carlos Rolón
Hexton, Aspen
PARADISE, 2023

Cotton Yarn, Enamel and Fabric on Repurposed Polyethylene Tarp. 68 x 68 in.

Nep Sidhu
Patel Brown; Toronto, Montreal
A Song for My Father, in the Tune of My Mother, 2017

Cotton, wool, hoot, steel. 144 x 129 in.

Photo by Cheri Eisenberg.

Rosario Zorraquin
Isla Flotante, Buenos Aires
Tamizha Sessions

Grouping of stretched pieces.

Photo by Cheri Eisenberg.