Live from the West

Saturday July 9th, 6pm

The Gallery at REDCAT presents Live from the West, a collaborative exhibition created by Portuguese artist Pedro Barateiro and Los Angeles-born poet Quinn Latimer, July 9 to September 18, 2016.

Live from the West emerges from a set of common interests shared by Barateiro and Latimer, including a mutual engagement with literature and publishing as an aesthetic practice; an interest in readings of the West in the neocolonial present; and counter-hegemonic epistemologies, images, and narratives of resistance. The relationships and movement between politics and fiction, and the body and the body politic, as manifested in modes and modalities of the voice—issues of orality, literature, the cinematic soundtrack, and others—inform both Barateiro’s and Latimer’s individual work, as well as the exhibition they create together.

For the exhibition, a series of poems by Latimer are broadcast within a setting of Barateiro’s photographs and sculptures. The poetry situates the speaker as both implicated in and resistant to a series of crises and landscapes that define the Western imaginary and the real — issues of austerity, militarism, terrorism, economic and ecological violence, along with the projected and very real sites of Greece, Switzerland, and California.

Barateiro’s series of photographs Dancing in the Studio (Protest) is presented on freestanding screens, creating relationships between the photographs and a group of sculptures used as benches, as well as the loudspeakers from which Latimer’s texts are broadcast. Barateiro created the group of photographs by applying white paint to a black linoleum floor placed in the middle of his studio in Lisbon. At the same time, just outside his studio, a loud demonstration was happening—a typical occurrence of the period. Since 2011 there have been protests on the streets of Lisbon nearly every day; they have become a constant sound track for the city’s residents. The protests are a reaction to the austerity measures instituted by the European Union since the most recent financial crisis, most apparent in smaller, southern economies of the EU, such as Portugal’s and Greece’s. The traces left on the painted floor—both painterly gestural marks and prints from the tread of the artist’s sneakers—are unchoreographed movements of a dance, a protest, an action and a reaction.

The title Live from the West addresses issues inherent to both Barateiro’s and Latimer’s practices, as well as shared history of their similar readings and geographic positions. The setting is Los Angeles but also Lisbon and Athens. The address is “live” and is “from the West,” wherever that may be. The exhibition is an inquiry into and a reflection on what it means to live in the so-called West of the world under fabricated, fictional, and sometimes very real crises—economic, ecological, sociopolitical, and others. Live from the West broadcasts from the normalized state of exception that exemplifies our neocolonial period; it narrates and explores the body and the voice in acts of complicity and protest, private and public space, periphery and center.