Iván Argote

Through his sculptures, installations, films and interventions, Iván Argote questions our intimate relationships with other people, institutions, power and belief systems. He builds strategies based on tenderness, affect and humour which he uses to suggest critical approaches to dominant historical narratives and attempts to decentralise them. 

La Estrategia was inspired by the motivations and actions of the Colombian revolutionary groups and communities of the 1970s and 1980s, of which his parents were members. In this video, he recreates and films actions initiated by these groups, creating a dialogue between the past and the present. In Reddishblue Memories, Iván Argote explores the theory that Kodak developed Ektachrome film in the late 1960s because Kodachrome film tended to redden over time, which would have been unthinkable for an American company in the context of the Cold War. This video, simultaneously narrated by the artist and Oxana Shacko (1987-2018), a Ukrainian activist and co-founder of the Femen movement, is part of a larger project involving installations and sculptures. The last film shown, La Plaza del Chafleo, begins in an imaginary square for which Iván Argote invents the verb “Chaflear”, a word of all possibilities and a call to insurrection.  

La Estrategia, 2012, 33 min 
Reddishblue Memories, 2017, 13 min 
La Plaza del Chafleo, 2019, 16 min 

Screening followed by a conversation between Iván Argote and Aurélien Bernard, Curator in the Contemporary Creation and Forecasting department.