Paulina Velázquez Solís, of the Department of Art, Art History, and Architecture (AAHA), was invited to show a video installation at Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo in San José Costa Rica, as part of the digital media exhibition Displacements. Recent moving image art in Costa Rica, curated by Fernando Chavez Espinach and José Daniel Picado García. The exhibition opened in June 15th and will be in view until the end of July.
About the exhibition:
The moving image is everywhere. Its nature is expanding, adapting, transforming, and surrounding us. The democratic promise of film and video was later connected to the explosion of digital art. Film, museum and the Internet see now how their porous borders, and what once was exclusively a film to be projected in a dark room, now finds its home in the museum; what once tool testing in the digital space is now everyday watching.
Displacements. Recent moving image art in Costa Rica gathers works that shift between exhibition and projection spaces, and that search a place to contact their audiences in a context of fewer formal screens and little discussion on the subject. We bring together different forms of the moving image to question if, beyond their specific genealogies, practices such as video art, experimental film, expanded film, some digital art, and video-installation remain as distant in our medium as they used to.
Through looped projections, special screenings, installations, and other interventions, we show a glimpse of contemporary moving image art in Costa Rica. In this selection, we can appreciate the heritage of video art, with its democratic impulse and its proximity to the body, as well as that of experimental cinema and its undermining of traditional narrative. In parallel, we also look at stimulating approaches to audiovisual production that feed from diverse artistic languages to enrich new visions.
In this debate, it is not possible to disregard the irruption of the most recent wave of digital art, whose Costa Rican history is yet to be told. The deluge of digital creations, augmented reality, NFTs, and artificial intelligence question the tenets of what constitutes the images that surround us, that we inhabit, and that inhabit us. Recovering the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design’s mission to highlight the entanglement of technology and art, and audiovisual artistic traditions, we suggest a brief tour across images that travel through new spaces and new ideas, with the objective of questioning: What are some contemporary manifestations of moving image art in Costa Rica? How have screens and spaces available to it changed? What new entanglements will we see in the future?
The curators’ selection is complemented by guest programs by Block Eureka, gallery that works with digital art, specialized in NFT, and Videotitlán, a travelling Mexican project that compiled works by Costa Rican artists in 2022. Displacements will tour to different communities in appropriate formats for each space in 2023.
