Oscar Muñoz: Documentos de la amnesia

The Meiac of Badajoz presents Documentos de la amnesia, Oscar Muñoz' first solo show in Spain. The show includes 10 pieces in different formats and techniques, particularly noteworthy among which is Panóptico, an impressive installation located on the forth floor of the central tower of the museum. It functions as a circular camera obscura that, through twenty screens, provides a real time view of the cityscape of Badajoz, which can be called "magic". The work refers to the history of the current Meiac site-which used to be a Panopticon-as well as to the concept of panoptic society-the society of total visibility-developed by Michel Foucault.

The large number and exceptional quality of the works included in this show also provides visitors with a good idea of the entire body of work of this Colombian artist, represented at the latest Venice Biennale by Proyecto para un memorial, a set of five coordinated video projections that are also part of this exhibition, and in the museum's collection.

Oscar Muñoz-currently among the Ibero-American artists enjoying the most international acclaim-has mainly focused on investigating the possibilities of photography and video in order to explore, in a very original way, themes such as memory, identity, portrait and self-portrait, the impact of time and the corrosive effects of entropy. And according to Carlos Jimenez, the curator of the show, the exhibition itself has been approached as a device composed of the different gear, machines and technologies of vision used by Muñoz, thus demonstrating the extent to which reflection on the gaze, its role, its status and its specific ambiguities, has been crucial in determining the work of this notable artist. This reiterated concern-adds the curator-clearly differentiates Oscar Muñoz from artists who limit themselves to mere clever game-playing with the new media and electronic tools."

The artist, who has had an essential relation to drawing since his earliest work, explains that "despite man's technological-digital skills today, the relation of our hand holding a pencil and that of our fingers with the Mouse is quite different. I once heard something said about the memorable drawing: the hand holds the pencil between its two extremes and between them there is a struggle between sharpness and error."

Another of Oscar Muñoz' concerns focuses on the instant. "I am interested in working intensely with the instant", he asserts. "To a large extent because of this manifest instantaneousness of our lives, or at least, of our way of understanding what we are living: yesterday an event erased that of the day before, today something new erases that of yesterday, and tomorrow there will surely be another event that will outdo the others and we thus survive the instant without being able to perceive the imperceptible, as Bordieu says."

There is a bilingual catalogue, which includes texts by Lupe Álvarez, Carlos Jiménez and Santiago Olmo, in addition to a dialogue between the artist and Maria Inés Rodríguez.

Oscar Muñoz
Documentos de la amnesia