A conversation between Gabriel Kuri, Roselin Rodríguez and Damián Ortega
About the book:
For the past ten years, Gabriel Kuri has been photographing two kinds of displays: emergency escape plans for buildings—hotels, museums, warehouses, etc.—and cleaning charts found in public washrooms. Both series have evolved in parallel, marking Kuri’s movements around the world. Once weaved together, they constitute the backbone of Form of Contingency and Pattern of Imminence.
The concepts of imminence and contingency seem oppositional at first, something that will occur versus something that may never happen. But through Kuri’s apparently casual yet persistent visual recording of plans and charts, such contrast is put into question. A third element amplifies this posture: a series of black ink drawings printed on transparent paper, then superimposed on both sets of photographs. The artist's presence—his active role in witnessing and documenting—is extended to these sketches made in response to each set of photographs. As with drawing exercises, these marks are made blindly, concentrating on the dates, times, initials, names, and geometric shapes. As such, the artist’s mapping reflects and, at the same time, dismantles the contingency/imminence dualism, suggesting the inevitability of a certain amount of chaos even in the most formal, most detailed of human efforts to plan and structure.
A text by British writer and critic James Cahill completes the book. Sprouting from an in-depth conversation with Kuri and somehow mimicking his conceptual stands on form and content, Cahill’s contribution is both a detailed analysis of the overall project and a lyrical journey through the artist’s mind.
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Friday, February 7, 1 pm
kurimanzutto Mexico City