“The Francis Naranjo Foundation is a cultural exchange project that revolves around experimentation and dynamism, maintaining an important link with South America, due to our social and cultural closeness.” These are the words of the artist from Gran Canaria Francis Orange, that gives its name to the foundation, on the objective of the new headquarters that, under a collaboration agreement with the City Council of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain), will be inaugurated this Saturday, June 4, at 7:00 p.m., in the Avenida Primero de Mayo No. 63.
This inaugural act will be with the Black exhibition that includes a list of 17 international artists from eight countries and four continents and in which that intention of ties with Latin America and Africa materializes through contemporary creation in various formats such as photography, painting, sculpture, audiovisual, or performance. Lecuona and Hernández, Mamadou Gomis, Teresa Correa, Liliana Zapata or Dado Nadi Jessica are some of the authors. The exhibition will be open until August 29 with hours from Monday to Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and from 5:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. and Saturdays from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
«Here we will try to generate temporary exhibitions with links to these two continents basically», adds the artist. This had already materialized in the exhibitions that Naranjo had made in the Mata Castle Museum previously, so the current objective “is to continue delving with our own headquarters and that we can commit ourselves to other circumstances that were previously complex or alien to us”. The reason why it is opening now is because “generating a cultural project is complex, we have been developing it for years, and now the time has come to be able to enter into this circumstance of having physical space. It has been a process of years that culminates now with this alternative. The current exhibition reflects on the current political and health circumstances “and from that dark side show those wounds to try to heal them.” The link that connects all the pieces is black and they all talk about that dark side, which in reality are «those circumstances that often annihilate us such as gender violence, identity, disappeared from the civil war, childhood and adolescent education, the situation in first world countries where young people interact in a different way, the ecosystem, landscape or ritual”, he adds. Therefore, “it can be understood as a single block from a single reflection.”
Each piece has a conceptual density and a narrative “that I consider interesting to assess better through dialogue with the rest of the works,” adds Naranjo. “And we have three different spaces so the pieces have been distributed throughout the different rooms, generating a route in such a way that one piece complements another so that the viewer draws a conclusion from the exhibition as a whole and not anecdotally around specific pieces». Although occasionally “we are going to make my work visible, the fundamental thing will be the programming of other artists.”
Thus, in the next exhibition there will be two artists from Chile who are working expressly for these spaces. “Right now I am going to curate a large exhibition at the Mud Museum in Paraguay and next year we have an exhibition of artists from this country. The attitude is with my contacts to generate links with which we can materialize them in exhibition contexts. And that Canarian artists can move to other contexts since we have collaboration agreements with other institutions».
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