Jimmie Durham / David Hammons / Pedro Cabrita Reis

The Belluard Bollwerk International Festival, which celebrated in 1993 its 10th anniversary, and Fri-Art combined their efforts to set up an exhibition of exceptional caractère.

Jimmie Durham adopts an artistic attitude founded on the acceptance of the presence of what is. He gives life again where it seemed to have disappeared – craniums, dried animals, metal parts found in the desert. The character given to these elements always has a tragic side, the beauty being deformed, since it belongs to life, it is prone to accidents, limits, frictions due to insoluble oppression related to the development of the history. Durham shows the nostalgia of nature present in our culture and the inevitable contribution of a cultural point of view in nature.

The sculptures of David Hammons, assemblies and installations, often recreate the structures of the Afro-American life, thus widening the conceptions one can have of the American culture. The power of the work of Hammons results from the relevance of its associations, of its narratif fragments, cultural desideratas expressed by the materials which he uses. While defining himself inside visual arts as a descendant of the tradition of jazz, he succeeded in inflecting the figure, almost mythical but also enigmatic, of the jazz musician, practically transforming his existence into a skilful comment on politics and the manifestations of the non conventional American culture.

Pedro Cabrita Reis refers to the daily experiment of the human being according to cultural standards, of the occupation of space. The space, the evolution, displacements of each object in space obey to laws. The work of Pedro Cabrita Reis denounces the new difficulty, even impossibility, of the contemporary human being to meet the other, in spite of the plethora of new techniques of communication. He draws quiet meetings of which there remain only traces or signs.