ARTIST PROFILE

Alejandro Morales

  • Mexico (b. 1990 in Juarez)
  • Currently in Juarez, Mexico.
  • Artist and curator, has been working with narcoviolence issues of his city and country, specially through the analysis and manipulation of media.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Since the world drives to a delirious state of things, we must drive to a delirious point of view.- Jean Baudrillard.

In a fight against the aesthetic power of the narco-violence, my current work consists in the disappearance, using gum eraser in a completely manual process, of cadavers that appear every day in the local newspaper of Ciudad Juárez "PM" (or Post meridiem), renowned for the brutality and irony with which it handles the issues related to drug trafficking in Mexico’s border with the US.Also, collecting the eraser residue, the bodies find resting becoming a metaphor of ashes. This action directly affects the memory of the city, and produces a document / residue that appeals to amnesty because it does not discriminate the nature of the cadaver -victim or victimizer-, which has been judged already on the journalistic publication and become a number in the ominous national landscape. This is an exercise of power from the image which through invisibility of the body makes visible the anesthetic problem that we face every day. Thus, evaluates and reflects the aesthetic environment experienced on a daily basis through the media and their products and how they can shape and change the language and identity of a society surrounded and crossed by violence. My work moves through scenarios of the (in) visible processes of collective imaginary where abandoned coolers, vacant lots and forensic paraphernalia match.A.morales


BIOGRAPHY

Alejandro Morales was born in Ciudad Juarez, on February 18, 1990. Graduated with honors bachelor's degree in Art Theory and Criticism at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez (UACJ, 2013) has taken seminars and workshops in areas such as FLACSO-17 Institute of Critical Studies (2013), Multinational Workshop (2013), University of Chile (2012), Visions of Art (Berlin, 2010), as well as various art clinical programs (Marcos Ramírez ERRE Cristina Rivera Garza, among others).

He has worked in the areas of organization, research and development of exhibitions and catalogs in the Solidarity Museum Salvador Allende and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice at the Centro Cultural Palacio La Moneda. As a producer he has worked for national and international artists (Francis Alÿs, Teresa Margolles, Josechu Dávila, among others) that have directly influenced his artistic creation. Guest speaker at the U of Chile, UACJ and Rubin Center for the Visual Arts. He has exhibited in Mexico, USA, Chile, Korea, France and Brazil.

He was recently selected by the Program ICHICULT-CONACULTA Publications Visual Arts, the photoessay The Portrait of a Lack (2014), which serves the printed image as dermal violent metaphor in the intimacy of touch and the absence of the corpse; International Festival of Belo Horizonte (2013); Third Biennial Border Juárez - El Paso (2013) and emerging photographer featured by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chile.Currently working as a guest curator at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts in an exhibition that takes the index as a critical generator in the context of Ciudad Juárez