FLORA ARS+NATURA 2015/ BOGOTA-COLOMBIA
\n\nKUNSTHALLE OSNABRUCK 2016/ OSNABRUCK-GERMANY
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\n\nAvistamiento - Sighting titles an exhibition gathering series of performances (solo and group), drawings, found objects, sculptural installations, documentations of performances, texts and environments that constitute the culmination of a long research Maria Jose began in mid 2009 in New York city, when she first started to bird watch. Thus, an important element becomes crucial for Arjona's approach to art’s ethical matter: the animal, more specifically the species of hawk Buteo swainsoni. Guided by circumstantial encounters, by the bird’s migratory behaviors, and by quasi-magical, certainly mystical-spiritual events – despite Arjona express efforts to “trying to keep my research as rational as possible” – the four exhibitions of Avistamiento – Sighting so far (Flora Ars Natura, Bogotá 2015; Kunsthalle Osnabrück, 2016; Gallery Barbara Thumm, Berlin 2016; Art Yard, New York 2017), are so many different editions of the artist's travelogue in her inter-continental and trans-hemispheric perambulations directed by and through, the bird’s guidance, delineating a net of migratory lines across the Americas, unraveling another kind of storytelling, another version of shared animal-human history. Avistamiento enacts the most clear instance of Arjona's approach to the ethical matter of art as essentially affective, intangible, spiritual, animal – and therefore intrinsically political.
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