“Our lives are haunted by ghosts, our own personal ghosts
and the collective ghosts of our society”
Susan Hiller
Galería Max Estrella is pleased to present Ghosts, a group show organized by American curator Kathleen Forde.
Artists include Laurie Anderson (Illinois, 1947), Susan Hiller (Florida, 1940), Bill Viola (New York, 1951) Abelardo Morell (Havana, Cuba, 1948) and Eugenio Ampudia (Valladolid, 1958).
The exhibition is rooted in work that relates to Jacques Derrida’s idea of the trace, or the mark left by an absent thing. In Derrida’s concept, every present bears the trace or the sign of absence, which defines it.
In this exhibition, all of the artworks explore the powerful nature of the absence of presence and the force and influence of memory. Laurie Anderson’s From the Air is a miniature, quasi-holographic projection of the artist herself and her dog Lolabelle, in which she uses her poignant storytelling to narrate the day a flock of flying turkey vultures swooped down upon her dog, awaking the creature’s fear of a new environment, unknown until now by it: the air. This domestic anecdote is compared with the state of conscience of her New Yorker neighbors after 9/11, when the residents, just like Lolabelle, realized that danger could also come from the air. Fear turns into a ghost that lurks at us and, as Anderson states, a door we passed through to never come back from.
