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Mario García Torres
The Way They Looked at Each Other, n.d.

Still: TBA21 | Courtesy the artist

Mario García Torres

Commissions & Productions

Commissions

Single-channel video installation, color, sound
36 min 34 sec
Commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

The Way They Looked at Each Other, commissoned by TBA21 on the occassion of Mario García Torres solo show at TBA21 in Vienna, is a visual essay on the tangential use of photography, the significance of the delay implicit in revisiting any photographic snapshot, and the way one sees more things from a position with less perspective. The film revolves around an event that took place in 2011, eight years after the US invasion of Iraq, when a Spanish team made up of a judge, court technicians, and a few witnesses arrived in Baghdad with the intention of proving US military personnel guilty of assault, claiming that they shot to death two journalists and wounded three others positioned on various balconies of the Palestine Hotel on August 8, 2003. During the investigation the Spanish judge, Santiago Pedraz, took two innocuous and belated photographs in an attempt to reconstruct the event. Yet the images revealed only the impossibility of untangling a moment from the past. The confusion or complication that ensued is a gesture that, in the artist’s eyes, gravitates more toward the symbolic than the forensic, thereby attesting to our subjectivity and our understanding of the visual politics of our times.

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Exhibition: 10th edition of Dharamshala International Film Festival
Institution: DIFF Dharamshala International Film Festival
Venue: Online

Mario García Torres (born 1975 in Monclova, México) is one of the most internationally renowned Latin American artists.^[1] He has used various media, including film, sound, performance, ‘museographic installations’ and video as a means to create his art.
García Torres currently lives in Mexico City.

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