Allora & Calzadilla. Privoy Automatic translate

Privoy is an installation of an artistic duet from Puerto Rico Allora & Calzadilla (Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla), created as part of the Garage Square Commission program.

Visitors to the Gorky Museum and Park will see the phantom flowering of the phantom golden tabebuia (Tabebuia chrysantha) - a tree characteristic of the Caribbean. The Arts Square in front of the Museum will be strewn with thousands of artificial flowers from this tropical plant. Flowers of tabebuy, atypical for our latitudes, discovered and seemingly “grafted” to trees in the center of Moscow (as the name of the project hints at), refer to large-scale changes in the environment, leading to monstrous natural disasters and a rapid reduction in the biodiversity of the planet.

Today, the Caribbean, whose natural resources have been systematically exploited since the time of Christopher Columbus, has lost a significant part of its original flora and fauna. Destructive and increasingly frequent hurricanes - a consequence of global climate change - are causing the death of millions of trees in this so-called hotbed of biodiversity - a region that is a significant source of biodiversity and is at the same time threatened with extinction. To date, there are 36 foci of biodiversity that cover 2, 4% of the entire land surface, with about 60% of all plant species, birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians living on Earth.

Allora & Calzadilla with their inherent poetry and scientific meticulousness create a subtle, lyrical, but therefore even more spectacular visualization of the environmental crisis. Tabebuille flowers scattered in the square are a kind of ghosts of distant (and possibly lost) places. They are Freudian creepy - on the one hand, because of their naturalness, and on the other - because of their own inappropriateness and even "impossibility": how could tabebuy flowers appear in trees of another species? This “naturalistic impossibility” is the most accurate image of irreversible environmental changes in which we are all involved.

The topics that the Privoy project raises have something in common with a large-scale exhibition “The world to come: ecology and new politics. 2030-2100 " , which will be held at the Garage Museum from June 28 to December 1, 2019.

Curator: Snezhana Krasteva

About the artists

Allora & Calzadilla (Jennifer Allora, born 1974, Philadelphia, and Guillermo Calzadilla, born 1971, Havana) is an art duo based in San Juan (Puerto Rico). Since 1995, the duo Allora & Calzadilla has created many experimental works, referring to various artistic media, including performance art, sculpture, sound and video art. The unique visual language Allora & Calzadilla, which reflects the duo’s interest in history, material culture and politics, is inextricably linked with a critical and visionary approach to meaning formation.

Solo exhibitions of the duo were held at the Serpentine Gallery (London), Kunsthalle Zurich, City Museum (Amsterdam), House of Art (Munich), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Castello di Rivoli Museum of Modern Art (Turin), Philadelphia Museum of Art, The XXI Century National Museum of Art XXI Century (Rome), the Anthony Tapies Foundation (Barcelona), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the Renaissance Society (Chicago), the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and others. In 2011, artists represented the United States at the 54th Venice Biennale. In 2015, at the request of the Dia Art Foundation, the duo created a site-specific installation “Puerto Rican Light” for the southern coast of Puerto Rico.

Allora & Calzadilla participated in various group exhibitions around the world, including exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017), the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul, 2017), the Royal Academy of Arts (London, 2016), and the Hong Kong Art Center )2016), Museum of the Moon (Shanghai, 2015), Center Pompidou (Paris, 2014), Museum of Solomon R. Guggenheim (New York, 2014). Artists also participated in the exhibition dOCUMENTA (13) (Kassel, 2012), the 24th and 29th Biennale in São Paulo (1998, 2010), the 5th, 7th and 10th Biennale in Gwangju (Republic Korea, 2004, 2008, 2014), 1st and 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2005, 2007), 51th and 56th Venice Biennale (2005, 2015), Whitney Biennale (New York, 2006), 8th and 13th Biennale in Sharjah (United Arab Emirates, 2007, 2017).