Today

After two years of having presence in Mexico and without a fixed location, Galerie Nordenhake has finally decided for la Colonia Roma, with a reassembled space designed by the young architect Frida Escobedo.

During the conversations with Frida Escobedo about the evolution of the architectural project, arose the idea of making public the process of remodeling that the space went through, as an effort to allow the public to get to know the ideas that guide Nordenhake in its pursuit to reach out to the people from a context-based spatial and expository experience.

From this same standpoint rises the approach of the inaugural exhibition, which will band together the work of the Mexican architect with two key artists for contemporary art in the international venues and Mexico: Francis Alÿs (Antwerp, 1959) and On Kawara (Kariya, 1932 – New York, 2014).

Today ​takes its name from On Kawara’s homonymous series, to explore the diverse pathways in which time can be understood and how the past can be transformed from the present in the concurrence with the observer. In the same manner, the three pieces that compose the exhibition engage with the implications and the effects that the passage of time has over the space, whether physical, material or imaginary.

The Other (​Lo Otro​, 2018) by Frida Escobedo is an installation composed of 21 pieces of glass extracted from the windows of a decayed building from the 70’s in the Colonia Juarez, whose materiality reveals traces of the multiple stories that they witnessed. It is in such a manner that the remnants of dirt, paint or adhered stickers on the glass surface, no longer diaphanous, function for the architect as an almost archaeological material that displays a narrative of the course of architectural modernity in Mexico.

In its own account, ​Today ​(1981) by On Kawara is a painting that displays the month, day and year in which it was made: July 9, 1981, as it also happens in all the pieces of this series that the Japanese artist made and finished on a specific date. Seen from the front and through the demarcation of time, the installation and the painting enter into a dialogue: on the one hand, Escobedo's work displays the passage of time through the anonymous accumulation in a building; on the other, the Japanese artist registers the lived experience of temporality with an specific measure in the globalized Western calendar.

Finally, ​Sunpath (1999) one of the most iconic pieces of Francis Alÿs' production in the 90’s, engages in a subtle antagonism to the other two works. Halfway between the continuous action of performance and photographic documentation, a group of people move in tune with the shadow that the Mexican flag casts over the plate of the Zócalo of the capital over the course of a day, as if it were the hands of a clock.

— Galerie Nordenhake

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Cover image: OnKawara, July 9, 1981, 1981 © Gerhard Kassner. Courtesy: Galerie Nordenhake