Appropriation, storytelling, reenactment, and reportage are some of the strategies that the Mexican artist Mario García Torres deploys to uncover (hidden) histories, narratives, and strategies embedded in sites and places and thereby to highlight the limitations of factual evidence and the agency of historical records and objects. An Arrival Tale uses a conceptual gesture that detaches the works by the artist in the TBA21 collection from their original contexts and descriptions and offers them as a collection of narratives and artistic experiments open for reinscription thereby addressing the contemporary conditions and urgencies of our societies. It examines the space of arrival as a complicated and disjointed nexus between departure, displacement, and return.

This publication, accompanies the exhibition Mario García Torres: An Arrival Tale, presented at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Augarten, Vienna. While conceived in relation to the exhibition, this book is not a documentation, but rather is a site of independent departure, a start of a journey that expands, explores, complicates and undoes the thematic threads of spatial disjunction, recollection, untimeliness, asynchronicity, the question of the present tense, fictionality, photography, and the politics of visibility.


Copublished with Sternberg Press, Berlin on the occasion of the exhibition Mario García Torres: An Arrival Tale, June 17–November 20, 2016, at TBA21–Augarten, Vienna.