Events/Openings

Tanya Leighton Gallery is pleased to announce the second solo exhibition of Alejandro Cesarco in Berlin.

The Early Years is a constellation of new works that furthers Cesarco’s interests in the possibilities of personal narrative, that is, how we tell (edit, remember, fictionalize, etc.,) our own story to ourselves. The Early Years, as with other attempts at writing the self, is both an experience and consequence of discourse.

The exhibition is composed of four discreet yet interrelated works (all 2012):

‘Index (An Orphan)’ is the fourth in an ongoing series of indices Cesarco has composed for books he has not yet written and most probably never will. This particular one addresses the experience of mourning, the loss of childhood, and becoming an orphan as an adult.

‘Where I’m Calling From”’ is an imagined book, laid out in four prints, that compiles a series of photographs and texts that exorcises some of the artist’s influences and early work. The compiled works and references are an unveiling of methodologies that act as a direct confrontation with the past, perhaps as a way to lay it to rest and to start anew.

‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ is a condensed and personalized translation of Joyce’s classic, consisting of all the Januaries of Cesarco’s youth.

And, ‘In Time’, is a new video work that theatricalizes and references Cesarco’s previous video work, ‘Methodology’, produced for the Uruguayan Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale. The new work takes up the two characters from ‘Methodology’ and projects them 10 or 15 years into the future. The couple speaks to each other only through texts they read. She reads from her own literary production and he reads a text he is writing about her work. In spite of text being an alienating factor between them, it is also through this indirect address that they entertain an illusion of possibility: of understanding, of change, of contentment.