In this exhibition, Rodrigo Arteaga and Romain Mader will unveil their latest works produced during their residency at the Academy of Visual Arts since January 2019.
Rodrigo Arteaga made a series of sculptures using found objects and materials gathered around his studio at AVA HKBU and also in fresh markets, dried seafood shops, Chinese medicine shops, and museums. His work tries to combine medicinal elements with found discarded objects that could be thought as contemporary ruins by the use of museum display mechanisms. Objects are sourced for their sculptural qualities as well as for food or medicinal purposes. The wire armatures or museum devices of display in Rodrigo’s work become entangled and abstract, turning into scaffoldings or a strange cityscape. They use the language of the museum but they also take some distance from it. By presenting discarded objects as archaeological treasures there is an attempt to dissolve dichotomies between systems of value. Rodrigo’s work has been focused on the complexity of the relation between nature and culture.
About Rodrigo Arteaga
Rodrigo Arteaga is interested in understanding our ways of understanding the world. His work has been focused on ideas about “nature” and “culture”, hopefully to collaborate on the rethinking of our notions of these concepts. He has worked mainly with scientific approaches to nature such as botany, microbiology, geography, natural history, cabinets of curiosities, anatomy and astronomy. He is interested in the fragility of knowledge and certainties, as in the way publications that had the ambition of having the newest and most exact observations of the world end up becoming obsolete and forgotten in old bookstores. Maybe it is a place in which ideas reach their limit in trying to explain the world by projecting our efforts to do so.Click here to learn more about Rodrigo Arteaga.
About Romain Mader
Romain Mader (1988, lives and work in Zürich CH) received a MFA at ZHdK Zürich and a BA with honours in photography from ECAL, Lausanne. He is a Swiss artist who explores themes of gender-representation, loneliness and human behaviour in a connected world.
His work has been exhibited at Tate Modern, London, FOAM Amsterdam, UNTITLED Miami, Art Rotterdam, Paris Photo, OCAT Shanghai and Shenzhen, Musée d‘art de Pully, Coalmine Winterthur, Images in Vevey, and published in 2016 in a monograph titled « Ekaterina » by Mörel Books in London.
In March 2017, Romain Mader was selected as the eleventh winner of the Foam Paul Huf Award. He came to international attention after his work was featured in the 2016 group exhibition Performing for the Camera in London’s Tate Modern. Mader’s work has been included in several international group exhibitions. FOAM presented his first international solo exhibition. Since 2012, Mader regularly collaborates with artist Nadja Kilchhofer.
The strong performative aspect, that can be seen in Maders photographic and video works, gets renewed in his most recent works where he is creating set design, paintings and using himself as an actor for his own work.
In 2015 he was resident for six months at the Atelier Vaudois du 700e at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris and in 2016 he resided for a month in the residency La Fragua in Belalcazar, Spain. Early 2019 Mader has be in residence at AVA residency in Hong Kong from January through March.
Click here to learn more about Romain Mader.