Foreigners Know.

Andrés Pereira Paz & David Reiber Otálora

Exhibition

27 Aug – 28 Aug 2021 Opening 27 Aug 18:00

foreigners_know

Andrés Pereira Paz & David Reiber Otálora, Foreigners Know., 2021

In her collection of poems entitled DMZ Colony, Don Mee Choi answers her own question of “How do I know?” with “Foreigners know”. As such, it is less a claim than a conclusion. Over one weekend, two installations by Andres Pereira Paz and David Reiber Otálora dive into this kind of complicated knowledge of the foreigner. Both gently trace it as expressed in the experience of those displaced, racialized and brutalized within the ongoing workings of European colonialism.

In Pereira Paz’s installation, it takes form as a flight path. Song and heartbeat evoke the unlikely journey of a Guajojó bird that had fled the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest to the Bolivian city of La Paz. Accompanied by astral figures that appear to be illuminated by flames, the installation registers the knowledge of an animal made a foreigner in their own right. The figures in Reiber Otáloras installation wear the hats of a different kind of foreigner altogether, those of the colonizers. Against the backdrop of the countless atrocities conducted in the pursuit of knowledge, the installation “Hot, Heimat, Horizon” indexes the delusional core of colonial knowledge regimes. The misty desire to lose oneself in the so-called “other” has brutal consequences for all those who are on the wrong end of the field-glass.

Andrés Pereira Paz (*1986 en La Paz. Lives and works in Berlin) has extensively exhibited across Latin America, USA and Europe. Recently his works have been featured at 11th Berlin Biennale; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; The Ryder Projects and Gasworks, London; Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga; Kinderhook & Caracas, Berlin; National Museum of Art, La Paz; Second Grand Tropical Biennale, San Juan de Puerto Rico, a.o. In 2022 he will have a solo exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. He is due to have a solo presentation at Statements in Art Basel with Isla Flotante (Arg) this Fall and is shortlisted for the 6th edition of the Future Generation Art Prize. Pereira Paz is represented by brunand brunand in Berlin, and Isla Flotante in Buenos Aires.

David Reiber Otálora (*1992 in Münster, raised in Colombia) studied at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts until 2020, with Matt Mullican, Robert Bramkamp and Angela Schanelec. In addition to a solo exhibition at Gießener Kunstverein (2019), his works have been featured at Kunstverein Dortmund in collaboration with Urbane Künste Ruhr (2021), Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg (2019), and Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt (2017). He lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin.