SFAQ - Ojo en Rotacion: Sara Minter at MUAC

Ojo en rotación: Sarah Minter, imágenes en movimiento 1981-2015
March 14 – August 2, 2015
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, DF

Spinning (2006) is a logical beginning for a survey exhibition of an artist whose practice was galvanized by the 1985 earthquake that devastated Mexico City. Leveling buildings and killing thousands, the quake forced citizens to hodge-podge makeshift systems for survival when the government failed to rescue the shaken metropolis. Spinning first takes stock of what still stands in the city’s view, and then whirls it into oblivion.

Exhibited in the hallway of the brutal-ish glass and concrete MUAC, Spinning is a series of seven screens displaying the shifting view of the urban sprawl of Mexico City from the world’s largest rotating restaurant set curiously askew atop the World Trade Center: an anachronistic symbol of folly in Mexico City’s checkered history of urban development. [1]Moving across the screens, left to right, the speed of the rotation increases until the last screen is practically indecipherable, a blur of urban grey peppered with occasional visual thwaps of the restaurant’s support beams interjecting the view. Then the sliding glass doors yawn open and the viewer trips dizzily into what looks like some kind of vidéothèque cemetery, MUAC’s survey exhibition of the work of video art pioneer Sarah Minter.
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