Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: That which identifies them, like the eye of the cyclops

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Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, "That which identifies them, like the eye of the cyclops (production still)," 2016

Image courtesy the artist.

Opening Reception: March 21, 2019, 7pm

Performance: March 23, 2019, 2pm MOUTHER In conjunction with this exhibition, Western Front will be hosting Santiago Muñoz and collaborator Marién Vélez for a week-long residency to develop an iteration of MOUTHER—a live arrangement of words, images, audio field recordings and the lighting work of Vélez. 

In the three-channel video, That which identifies them, like the eye of the Cyclops, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz draws her inspiration from Monique Wittig's 1969 experimental novel, Les Guérillères, depicting a world in which the patriarchy has fallen in a violent war of the sexes. Santiago Muñoz video installation provoke an imagined future, using documentary techniques to consider alternative models of being and how they might be made manifest in lived realities.

Similarly to Wittig's novel, the work occupies a space between reality and fiction. Santiago Muñoz has known many of the women in the video for more than a decade, all women who she is interested in for the ways their work and lives are transforming the material and symbolic reality of the worlds they live in. That which identifies them... is a reflection of their individual and collective subjectivities through the labour and gestures of everyday life.

In conjunction with this exhibition, Western Front will be hosting Santiago Muñoz and collaborator Marién Vélez for a week-long residency to develop an iteration of MOUTHER—a live arrangement of words, images, audio field recordings and the lighting work of Vélez. Santiago Muñoz refers to MOUTHER as less of a performance, but more of "a film before it becomes a film." Loosely based on Wittig’s Les Guerrilleres, MOUTHER is an ever-expanding work relating to the possibility of language to be imagined and real, the opposition of familiarity and direct experience to representation, as well as the possibility for objects to do the work of words, and vice versa. MOUTHER will take place on March 23rd at 2pm.

About Beatriz Santiago Muñoz Beatriz Santiago Muñoz lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her work arises out of long periods of observation and documentation, in which the camera is present as an object with social implications and as an instrument mediating aesthetic thought. Her films frequently start out through research into specific social structures, individuals, or events, which she transforms into moving image, at times supported by objects and texts. Santiago Muñoz’s recent work has been concerned with post-military land, Haitian poetics, and the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements. Recent solo exhibitions include: Song, Strategy, Sign at the New Museum, A Universe of Fragile Mirrors at the Pérez Art Museum of Miami, MATRULLA, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, México City; Post-Military Cinema, Glasgow International; The Black Cave, Gasworks, London. Her work is included in public and private collections, such as the Whitney Museum, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, and Kadist.