Andrés Ramírez Gaviria
10th Biennial Photoimagen, Dominican Republic
1 September – 1 November 2022
Photoimagen is the largest international photography festival in the Caribbean and has been held every two years since 2006. The tenth edition, which opened in September 2022, took place in 44 different exhibition spaces across six cities in the Dominican Republic.
For this biennial, Phileas supported the participation of the Austrian-based artist Andrés Ramírez Gaviria with a solo presentation of two of his works; History’s Carousel (2018), and Order is Numbers (Storyboard) (2015). History’s Carousel is an installation work, where a carousel slide projector presents a picturesque selection of family holiday photographs. The work is a nostalgic throwback to a time when families gathered to watch slideshows displayed on wobbly screens in home living rooms. Scenes of ancient ruins, quaint rural vistas, sandy seaside towns, and candlelit dinners become an evocative compendium of leisurely moments. Only the distinctive features of today's social media and its aesthetics, which these photographs occasionally still exhibit, interrupt the allusion to times long past.
Order is Numbers is another installation work in which Gaviria reflects on Darren Aronofsky’s 1998 science fiction film Pi. The movie is modified into a continuous black projection, only interrupted by film frames that correspond in number and location to the Fibonacci numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 ....). The film Pi centers on Max Cohen and his obsession with discovering the underlying pattern of the stock market. The number “pi”, the Fibonacci sequence, and the golden ratio are intimately connected in the film as mathematical proofs in Max's search for the ultimate order and pattern and their commonalities in apparently chaotic systems.
Gaviria’s self-reflexive visual study is a time-based code that matches the exact scheme Max Cohen seeks and is thus a mirroring of one code within another. In its altered format, the film renders a reconstruction of the original 84-minute narrative from just a few scattered images as daunting and indeed perhaps as contrived as Max Cohen’s personal search for patterned order in chaos. Ultimately, Gaviria’s treatment of the film is a reassertion that the line between order and chaos is both subjective and tenuous and also one of our own making with no intrinsic meaning outside of the meaning we choose to impose on it.
Andrés Ramírez Gaviria (born 1975 in Bogota, lives and works in Vienna, Austria) is a Colombian artist mainly working with photography and film. He often borrows cultural references from the history of art, design, science and technology to explore the ways in which contemporary perspectives of these historical references are continuously changing and developing. His work has been exhibited at Kunsthaus Graz; Caribbean Biennial and Museum of Modern Art, Dominican Republic; and Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogota.
