Share-e Naw Wanderings (A Film Treatment), 2006
Installation view: Mario Garcia Torres – An Arrival Tale, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, 2016
Photo: Anders Sune Berg / TBA21
Photo: Anders Sune Berg / TBA21
Collection
19 sheets of thermal paper
Dimensions variable
Share-e Naw Wonderings (A Film Treatment) marks the beginning of García Torres’s engagement with the histories of the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti in Afghanistan. This work (along with the later Tea, 1391) specifically traces the moment when Boetti moved to Kabul to became a hotelier at One Hotel, which he inhabited and ran until 1977.
Share-e Naw Wonderings (A Film Treatment) consists of a series of fictional faxes addressed to the deceased artist and revolves around García Torres’s fictive journey to Kabul in 2001 to find the building that once housed One Hotel. The faxes, written candidly in the first person, both discuss the mundane details of his trip, such as what he is eating and the small changes to the area, and also serve as a report on the political climate at the time in Afghanistan, a particularly charged moment, acknowledged through references to the presence of US troops and the threat of Osama Bin Laden. The work takes the form of 19 thermal paper prints, a medium known to be unstable and to return to its original colorlessness over time, giving the story a certain feel of authenticity, as the grit of the fax process is visible on the surfaces of paper, but also a limited life span as a transmittable form of narration.
*1975 in Monclova, Mexico | Living and working in Mexico City, Mexico
Dimensions variable
Share-e Naw Wonderings (A Film Treatment) marks the beginning of García Torres’s engagement with the histories of the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti in Afghanistan. This work (along with the later Tea, 1391) specifically traces the moment when Boetti moved to Kabul to became a hotelier at One Hotel, which he inhabited and ran until 1977.
Share-e Naw Wonderings (A Film Treatment) consists of a series of fictional faxes addressed to the deceased artist and revolves around García Torres’s fictive journey to Kabul in 2001 to find the building that once housed One Hotel. The faxes, written candidly in the first person, both discuss the mundane details of his trip, such as what he is eating and the small changes to the area, and also serve as a report on the political climate at the time in Afghanistan, a particularly charged moment, acknowledged through references to the presence of US troops and the threat of Osama Bin Laden. The work takes the form of 19 thermal paper prints, a medium known to be unstable and to return to its original colorlessness over time, giving the story a certain feel of authenticity, as the grit of the fax process is visible on the surfaces of paper, but also a limited life span as a transmittable form of narration.
*1975 in Monclova, Mexico | Living and working in Mexico City, Mexico
Mario García Torres on the exhibition “An Arrival Tale” at TBA21, Vienna 2016