We are very happy to announce the fourth solo exhibition of the Argentinian born (1975, Comodoro Rivadavia) artist Sebastian Diaz Morales at carlier | gebauer. Diaz Morales, who is living and working in Amsterdam, will present two new, interrelated video works "The way between two points (Terra Incognita)" (2009) and "Water from the moon" (2009), which are presented alongside one another in carlier | gebauer's large exhibition space. Photographs and sculptures will contextualize these two works.

Sebastian Diaz Morales' videos and video installations discuss in multiple ways the possibilities of an expanded form of filmic narration. Often, the people in his videos play the parts of extras of a scenery in which cultivated landscapes and urban spaces are reconverted into seemingly unconscious and renaturalized sites. Where man has reclaimed land, has adjusted nature to his aims, Diaz Morales' videos seem to perform a second nature', one which seems to be closer to its primary forms and which is guided by a logic, that shimmers through but is never fully graspable to mankind. Diaz Morales composes poetic narrations of the life of man's external nature. Being influenced by south-american avant-garde films as much as by north-american documentary photography, Diaz Morales interwines both into a visual world, in which the former symbolism and the latters rigorous layout of the line merge into a new life of forms. He releases the narrations which are inscribed into landscapes and things.

In "The way between two points (Terra Incognita)" a man traverses a stinted territory, whose only landmarks are wrecks, ruins and puddles of oil. With the wandering ways of this man, Diaz Morales maps out a landscape, which has been transformed, throughout the last 100 years, from what Charles Darwin called a "Terra Incognita" to a territory, marked by the devastating effects of its industurialization all through the 20th century. The film starts from this minimal information to than accompanies the route of a man, dressed in worker's boots and jeans. His clothes bring to mind the worker's outfits of those who lived here to extract the oil from the landscape. The man crosses this territory, with its leftovers of civilization, ruins of houses, covered in graffiti, open oil puddles, tarred streets and monuments to a glorified history of decline, which all seem to filter into a collection of evidences of the decay, this territory has been exposed to, and in which time and space seem to become only loosely connected. This indistincability of time, which is present in most of Diaz Morales' works, is also an omnipresent theme in the two new works. The present tense of the film describes a place in which past and future are similarly present.

The film location at which Diaz Morals shot this 2-channel video has also been the site of two previous works of his, Enigmatic Visitor, 2003 and Parallel 46, 1998. The way between two points (Terra Incognita) puts together fragments of a 82minute film yet to be completed, which will be on display in 2010, and montages them into being an entropic portrait of a region, imbruted through cultivation. In his delineation of pre-history, embedded within the industrial civilization of nature, Diaz Morales' video reminds of the works of Robert Smithson, whom, in his texts, sculptures and installations created manifestations of the entropic and overdeveloped state of amercian suburban housing. He, like Diaz Morales' figure of the worker, crossed deserted territories and reformulated them through his works.

This reformulation is at the center of the second installative video work in this exhibition, "Water from the moon", which also gives the exhibition its title.

The narrator, digressed from the viewer, sits in a sparsely furnished, sun flooded abode. Stripped to the waist, the man sits on a bed and after the camera has scanned the environment, the watered trees in the garden, he starts with an improvised monologue, in which he attempts to capture the experiences of an unreal and inhospitable environment, recapitulating its elelements, the predominant skies, the machines, the labour, in rephrasing them in an existential perspective, closing with the words "water from the moon", a metaphor for an impossible existence. It is only at the end of the film that it becomes clear that the worker and the narrator are actually sitting in the same room. The worker looks, without focussing, he sets on to a speech without speaking and he seems to be touched, without becoming more then only the expression of the narrator's monologue. Diaz Morales newest works reports from a language beyond functionalism, which covers in audio and video the object and the environement and change their logics.

Diaz Morales works are shown in 2009 and 2010 in numberous group exhibitions, amongst others in in "The World Is Yours - Contemporary Art", Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (until 2010), in "Art at the Centre of a responsible transformation of society 2009", Collezione FRAC Piemonte, Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella, Italy, in "Vista / Visual Tactics", Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla, Spaina and in "Pertenencia", Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentinia.

"The way between two points (Terra Incognita)", 2009 was produced with the support of the Hubert Bals Fund of the International Film Festival, Rotterdam and with the support of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

 

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