Hugo Aveta — La construction de l’équilibre — MAC VAL Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 5, 2019 → January 5, 2020

The works of this multimedia artist track the memories and the traces of the traumas experienced by his country. Using photography and film, he also addresses the more universal themes of memory and its transmission. In residence at MAC VAL, Aveta made a monumental work that was placed at the heart of “Persona grata?”, a hanging of the permanent collection which explored the question of hospitality.

This installation features a big wooden bridge that has collapsed at its centre, summing up the paradox and fragile equilibrium of this construction. The bridge is a connection between two geographies, two peoples and two cultures, or two beings. Symbolically, it marks both a link and a break between one being and another. The bridge abolishes frontiers, uniting and separating at the same time.

Hugo Aveta, La fascination de la faille, 2019 Installation en bois Production MAC VAL — Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne.

Aveta is fascinated by material and by fault lines. His work evokes struggling forces, uncertainties, risks, failures, but also dreams and hopes that are fragile and shaken yet still standing.

A veritable visual and aural environment, the installation is completed by videos and photographs that the artist based on the personal relationship to the memory of a bridge. He thus explores memory as testimony, as historical construction, as a personal and collective process.

“The bridge has ceased to be a bridge and has become a work of art. From an aesthetic point of view, this is about the fascination with fault lines, with their morphology and topology, their unexpected destiny, their arrival and reception in the museum. From the point of view of function, it is about the failure of the bridge, its end, its ruin, and its tragedy, but not the loss of its vocation to unite, to communicate.” Hugo Aveta

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Hugo Aveta is Argentinean. Born in 1965, he currently lives in Cordoba.

Hugo Aveta has had numerous solo and group shows, notably at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires (MAMBA), the Museo de Arte Contemporanea di Roma (MACRO), the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA) and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Salta (both Argentina), the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in California and, more recently, the Curitiba Bieñal (Brazil) and the Photoquai Biennale in Paris. Among the public collections holding his works are the MNBA, the MAMBA, the Museo Emilio Caraffa in Córdoba, MACRO, the Musée du Quai Branly, MOLAA and the Museo de la Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (MUNTREF), Buenos Aires.

Hugo Aveta was invited to take up a residency at MAC VAL within the framework of the second edition of BIENALSUR, a global event based in Argentina.