Birgit Rathsmann

Malpaso: A Collaborative Investigation by Alejandro Almanza Pereda,

Birgit Rathsmann and Rick Karr

Exhibition At The Clemente

The exhibition focuses on the artists’ dialogue with an historic river valley in Chiapas, Mexico that’s now submerged beneath the waters of a reservoir behind a dam -- a fluid locus where the quest for autonomy struggles to overcome thwarted beliefs.

The artists have long shared a fascination with water as a medium uniquely suited to upending assumptions small and large, a potent metaphor for knowledge that remains in a fluid state and never hardens into the kind of certainty that gives rise to rigid ideology.

The exhibition is organized around the metaphor of a small museum that documents the artists’ subjective experience of the landscape surrounding the Malpaso Reservoir in western Chiapas. The show investigates the historical layers of violence foisted onto this landscape as a consequence of colonialism, religion, and “progress”.

Press Release