ANÍBAL 
LÓPEZ
AT                            

'DURATIONAL'



[Venue]
Vanguard Gallery
Shanghai

[Date]
08/21
-
09/04/2021


Durational was a special screening program launched by Vanguard Gallery in 2021. Video art has been of great interest to Vanguard Gallery since the gallery’s inception. For more than a decade, the gallery has been collaborating with video-based artists in a multitude of approaches and perspectives. CELA contributed to the planning and execution of this project. The work Testimonio by Aníbal López was featured in the screening.  Aníbal López was born in 1964 in Guatemala, where he lived and worked until his passing in 2014. He was invited to participate in dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel and held a solo exhibition at the Centro Cultural de España in Guatemala City in 2011. López was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Young Artist at the 2001 Venice Biennale. His work questions and examines the world with projections to the future, where armed conflicts are kids’ toys, for children that have faith in living and not in hating (to live without hate). Without forgetting to judge the ones who have brought us to these poverty conditions and misinformation. He did not consider himself a conceptual or minimalist, but utilitarian of these mediums, as a precise way of approaching concrete subjects without much paraphernalia.
[Work]
Testimonio

Single-channel video | color | sound |
43'37'' | 2012

[Installation view]
Durational
Schedule of the work's screenings in the program


The project Testimonio by Aníbal López presented at dOCUMENTA (13) – Kassel, 2012 – consists in the complex and delicate attempt to shed light on the reality of Guatemala through the experience of a professional assassin. The artist, in fact, has built a sort of “conference” open to the public of dOCUMENTA (13), where the audience is free to ask any questions to the young Guatemalan. 


Guatemala is a country with a high rate of corruption and crime, and without a substantial democracy. The overall framework outlined by the assassin was to a lifestyle marked by violence, in a country where killing is simply a way to earn their living, a job which is not socially condemned, which was forced due to the conditions of a highly precarious life. In this sense, it was found a certain superficiality and lightness with which the assassin spoke of his work, which has urged the public to more further questions.


[External links]

Aníbal López
Vanguard Gallery