Monday, September 2, 2013

A conversation with Tobias Ostrander +
Postcards from the New Republic

Thursday 5 September, 2013, 7.30 pm, at Alice Yard


Tobias Ostrander is chief curator and deputy director for curatorial affairs at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. In early September 2013 he will visit Alice Yard to meet members of our network of collaborators and explore recent developments in Trinidad's art scene.

On Thursday 5 September, at 7.30 pm, Ostrander will give a short and informal talk about key issues in contemporary curatorship, some recent curatorial projects, and his vision for PAMM.



The evening also includes an installation of Postcards from the New Republic, a work by Pinky and Emigrante (Alicia Milne and Luis Vasquez La Roche), created during their recent participation in the Open Ateliers Zuidoost Artists in Residence (OAZO AIR) programme in Amsterdam.

P&E created a series of postcards and posters that poke fun at relations between the former coloniser and colonies that now make up the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Upon investigating the national symbols of the former Netherlands Antilles, P&E decided to redesign the coat of arms of Aruba and Curaçao by removing European elements and replacing them with imagery with an island context.

Images of the new coat of arms are combined in postcard and poster form with photographs of the Netherlands landscape, but labelled as an Antillean country. The project suggests questions about a hypothetical role reversal in Dutch colonial history, and notions of ownership and control.

All are invited.


About Tobias Ostrander:

Tobias Ostrander has served as chief curator and deputy director for curatorial affairs at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (formerly the Miami Art Museum) since 2011. From 2009 to 2011, he was the director of the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City, where he produced solo projects with numerous artists, including Geoffrey Farmer, Melanie Smith, Thomas Glassford, Karina Peisajovich, Mario Garcia Torres, Pablo Rasgado, Leonor Antunes, Praneet Soi, and Mariana Castillo Deball. From 2001 to 2009 he served as the Chief Curator at the Museo Tamayo. Examples of the exhibitions he produced there include Liliana Porter (2009); Jeff Wall (2008); Lisa Yuskavage (2006); Unspeakable Happiness: A Selection of Contemporary Art from China (2005); Sodium and Asphault: British Art in Mexico (2004); Bas Jan Ader (2003). He is a founding member of the Museum As Hub at the New Museum in New York City and has co-curated several exhibitions for the project, including: Marcel Broodthaers and Liliana Porter: The Incongruous Image (2011) and Tlatelolco and the localized negotiation of future imaginaries (2008). His recent exhibitions in Miami include Frames of Reference: Latin American Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection and Restless: Selections from the Collection of the Miami Art Museum (2012).

About Pinky and Emigrante:

Luis Vasquez La Roche was born in 1983 in Caracas, Venezuela. He moved to Trinidad and Tobago in 2002. He later studied visual arts at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. His works are explorations of personal experiences and his new adopted space and culture. He has participated in several group shows, such as Erotic Art Week TT (2010), Mensajes Positivos in Chile (2011), and PFC (pon una foto en la calle) in Venezuela (2012). In 2012 he had his first solo exhibition in Trinidad, titled The Search – La Busqueda.

Alicia Milne is a Trinidadian artist who enjoys working with tactile materials. She also has an interest in manipulating moving images. Her drawings, plaster, ceramic and video works have been exhibited in Trinidad, Grenada, and the United States. After a voluntary sabbatical while settling into teaching art in a local secondary school, she is currently working on a series that merges digital and drawn images on tactile surfaces.

While both artists maintain individual artistic practices, they also collaborate in creating street installations and pastings, zines, exhibitions, and murals.