Mario García Torres ‘An Arrival Tale’

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) is pleased to announce ‘An Arrival Tale’, an exhibition by Mario García Torres at TBA21–Augarten in Vienna, opening on June 17, 2016.

Storytelling, reenactment, and reportage are some of the strategies that Mario García Torres deploys to uncover (hidden) histories, narratives, and strategies embedded in archives, sites, and places and thereby to highlight the limitations of factual evidence and the agency of historical records and objects. ‘An Arrival Tale’ uses a conceptual gesture that detaches the works by the artist in the TBA21 Collection from their original contexts and descriptions and offers them as a collection of stories and artistic experiments open for reinscription thereby addressing the contemporary conditions and urgencies of our societies.

“An Arrival Tale is an exhibition that pretends to use a number of my works from the TBA21 Collection to argue that the space of arrival, the space where one can reinvent oneself, could be an interesting one, and one that has historically been a space to thrive,” states García Torres.

‘An Arrival Tale’ is conceived in light of TBA21’s engagements with the contemporary condition of continuous global migration and displacement. The exhibition seeks to collect, describe, and interrelate narratives of transplantation, pointing to migrations, displacements, relocations, and resettlements, which span both time and disparate geographies. By reimagining the frame of the exhibition itself García Torres opens up new possible readings, thus allowing for speculation on the possibilities of reinvention and transcendence. Like much of his work, the exhibition itself questions untimely certainties, both by looking back, complicating historical descriptions, and their relationship to the future and by looking forward and projecting new possibilities.

text: TBA21 (press release)