Los Padres Ausentes (2021)
In recent years, social demonstrations have put on everyone's lips a discussion that some believed secondary or settled: what do monuments represent in the public space? Should they be removed, destroyed, or kept in their original location? Why and for what purposes have these stone and bronze behemoths been arranged in public plazas? In the existence of some monuments, are there political reasons behind what, for some, seem mere decisions of decoration and urban planning?
Carlos Castro Arias intends to stir up this discussion through the exhibition Los Padres Ausentes (The Absent Parents). For two decades, Castro has been an observer of the mechanisms on how history is constructed. Through parody, sarcasm, appropriation of the strategies of the so-called "cult art" and the subversion of popular traditions and historical images, Castro reviews those episodes marginalized by official history and points out how that past that we thought was overcome survives strongly in the present.
The exhibition includes installations, videos, sculptures, and paintings that the artist has produced over the last 12 years and that help uncover the ideological charge that hides behind the statues of the public space: Simon Bolivar or Christopher Columbus are some of the characters in discussion and that serve Castro to talk about notions on "country", "home" and "political symbols". In the sculpture Pueblo, Castro “disrupts” the figure of Simon Bolivar, which he literally sets on fire, and in the video Who Doesn't Suffer Doesn't Live, some cannibalistic pigeons swallow the statue of Bolivar in Bogota’s main plaza.
Halim Badawi
Curator