BUY US! Cuerpxs, consuma y trabaje

Débora Delmar, Tobías Dirty, María Emilia García, Madeline Jiménez Santil, BetzaMee

Presented by NERI|BARRANCO & Lagos
Curated by Clavel (Ángela Cuahutle & Gaby Cepeda)

November 7 – December 7, 2019

BUY US! brings together works that reflect on bodies in relation to today's consumer society, thinking of advertising, pleasure, artifice and desire as concepts that intersect to articulate different forms of consumerism. The bodies are understood then, as places in which the purchasing power is displayed, the adherence to hegemonic canons and the brainwashing of labor exploitation - the body itself as a workplace in the gig economy -, but where powerful criticisms are also made of these structures. 

About the artists:

Débora Delmar (México 1986)

Débora Delmar investigates consumer culture, capitalism lifestyles and aspirational aesthetics, problematizing them based on the effects that globalization, hegemonic culture and the canons of gender, race and class that predominate in advertising have on daily life.

Tobías Dirty (Argentina, 1990)

Tobías Dirty's work criticizes the precarious position of artists in the attention economy. His work combine symbols and references from pop culture, counterculture and personal experiences, in an aesthetic of excess that seeks to queer-ify objects, subjects and work.

María Emilia García (México, 1992)

María Emilia explores topics such as hyper-consumerism and the strategies that corporations and institutions use to manipulate consumers. The practice of it raises a criticism considering gender and class. María Emilia García: How to find happiness (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsplJBj_G6o), 2017. Video

Madeline Jiménez Santil (Dominican Republic, 1986)

Madeline investigates the relationships between body/matter and geometry, rethinking the condition of the exotic, the strange and migration, addressing these phenomena from the understanding of her own body and in permanent dialogue with the space that surrounds her.

Betzamee (Mexico, 1991)

Betzamee analyzes the construction of identity as part of the artistic process and proposes collaboration as a formative model. Her paintings abound in visual ignominy, with discursive gestures that address the confessional from feminism.

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The exhibition is possible thanks to a collaboration between NERIBarranco (https://neribarranco.com/)  & Lagos, and is the result of their collaboration program with other local and international independent projects and agents.

CLAVEL is a curatorial platform formed by Gaby Cepeda and Ángela Cuahutle, which understands research, publication and curation as collective exercises to rethink and re-contextualize emerging artistic practices. Using methodologies of feminisms, CLAVEL focuses on practices that are usually simplified, tokenized or excluded; and it promotes agency strategies that generate and ensure spaces for anti-elitist discourses and processes.

NERIBarranco (b. 2017) is a nomadic contemporary art gallery that works with emerging Latin American artists based in Mexico. The nomadic character allows him to have a flexibility and a power of experimentation that cannot be obtained from a fixed physical place. In this sense, NERIBarranco has as an absolute priority the development of its artists in the short, medium and long term; considering the commercial and sales outlet as a necessary means of funding to keep the project sustainable in economic and financial terms.

Curatorial text:

To be able to consume at ease — constantly and voraciously — you need consumables, objects. Today everything is an object. Capital and the law of value infest like cysticercosis — with worms in the brain — everything we do. Everything can be extracted — with difficulty but resolvable, like the stuffed animal machines that with a little perseverance the metal claw takes a minion out of you — from its context, its meaning and its intention to become an easily interchangeable object. Lyotard used to say: "Objects appear and disappear like dolphin fins on the surface of the sea, and once objects [are delivered] to obsolescence.1" If everything is salable, everything has an expiration date.

As we expire, work is an area of ​​our lives in continuous metastasis. The status quo is the dogma of productivity, efficiency and profitability. Today we are the product, its producers and its consumers. For Marina Vishmidt, art is the domain par excellence of “speculation as a mode of production”: the artist as the prototype of the entrepreneur; the artist as the financial instrument collects all kinds of information, materials, objects, and reproduces them as art, in the same way that financial derivatives collect empirical phenomena and reproduce them as earnings2. Perhaps the most serious thing is that for Vishmidt the logic of “speculation as a form of production” is a biopolitical device to develop subjects who not only identify with capital ideologically, but also immanently and structurally. Artists who behave like capital. Art as primitive accumulation. The artist's aspirational freedom — her supposed rebellion against labor alienation — as a model that has been exported to other productive areas in the form of precariousness, artists such as the perfect workers in the gig-economy.

But the resistance remains. You can always resist even if at the same time we move slowly towards the meat grinder that makes us objects. There are places of resistance, grease holes, anti-heteronormative holes, anti-patriarchal and anti-racist holes, anti-money holes — that are still ruled by him, because material conditions decide who lives and who doesn't. Pleasure is also today optimized in time-based services or in highly efficient genital abstractions with physically impossible pleasure coefficients (2,700-6,300 vibrations per second). In many of those resistance holes you learn contouring, the workings of hormones, cosmetic technology, there are Bratz Dolls, demons, dogs, poetry and theory. These spaces coexist with the hyper-consumerist, hyper-violent reality, and although they flirt with it to earn a living — their living — they manage to retain something for themselves, the little that refuses to be an object and perhaps, if you wanted buy they would sell it, but his-hers, it would always be.

1 Jean François Lyotard, “Energumen Capitalism,” in Hatred of Capitalism, A Reader, ed. Chris Kraus (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), 234.

2 Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a mode of production : forms of value subjectivity in art and capital (Boston: Brill, 2018), 4.

Image credit : Alfredo Mora