ICE FLOE. The institutional issue. Crossroads between Eastern Europe and the River Plate region (Montevideo, Uruguay)

ICE FLOE. The institutional issue. Crossroads between Eastern Europe and the River Plate region builds bridges between some of those art practices analyzed by Gregorič and Milevska and similar ones (in their aims, methods or spirit) from the River Plate region of South America. MACMO’s research team (which also integrated students from the National School of Fine Arts from Montevideo) selected 10 artists and collectives from the Inside Out. Not so white cube show held at the City Art Gallery of Ljubljana (September-November, 2015) to be joined by 9 study cases addressing art works and art projects produced by artists from Uruguay and Argentina since the end of the sixties to the present day. Through this corpus, dialogues are established, similar symptoms are distinguished, and absences and differences are discerned, between two contexts of production which are very different in many aspects while sharing a series of common characteristics. The comparative analysis of this repertoire of artistic positions offers us some tools to put exotisms and isolations into question, to produce critical readings, and to construct contexts of interpretation that surpass local and national positions and terminologies.

It is well known that only a small fraction of the mass of an ice floe is visible over the surface of the water: most of it is hidden below. The art works and projects studied by MACMO’s research team deal with artistic institutions focusing on what they hide and conceal. These practices try to demonstrate, through a variety of strategies and methods, the contingency, historicity and calculated nature of what is taken for granted, immutable and non-ideological in art institutions and their behaviors.