The latest in Tate Modern’s series of international curatorial partnerships, No Lone Zone, will open in the Level 2 Gallery on 27 January, organised in collaboration with Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City. The exhibition takes its name from a military term designating an area where the presence of just one person is not allowed. Implying mutual observation, this two-person rule is often used in highly sensitive or unstable places for reasons of safety and security. The exhibition brings together the work of Teresa Margolles, Cinthia Marcelle, David Zink Yi and the collective Tercerunquinto, showing how each artist explores the vulnerability of current social and economic structures.
No Lone Zone presents a range of recent sculptures, videos, photographs and installations which address interwoven themes of history, nature and politics. Included in the exhibition will be Teresa Margolles’ Flag I 2009, a piece of fabric which has been imbued with blood taken from crime scenes on the northern border of Mexico. Margolles investigates the socio-cultural implications of violent deaths in contemporary Mexico, using the form of a flag to embody a traumatic reality. Also included in the exhibition is Margolles’ Score Settling 2008, which responds to a series of murders committed by drug dealers in the Sinaloa region. Glass fragments, collected by the artist from shot-out car windscreens, are fashioned into jewellery resembling that typically worn by narcos, those responsible for the killings. The work evokes the memorial value of the vestige, and the glass fragments possess a haunting testimony to an absent body.
The Mexican collective Tercerunquinto present their video installation Public sculpture in the urban periphery of Monterrey 2003 – 2006, exploring how human behaviour is determined by architecture. During a period of three years, the artists documented the activities of people in the local community on a 50-square-metre concrete platform built on the undeveloped outskirts of a Mexican city. Also on display will be Leitmotiv 2011, Cinthia Marcelle’s most recent work in a series of videos showing short symbolic actions. It shows the collective effort of a group of individuals sweeping water in an attempt to prevent the tide from disappearing. The abstract forms of the waves suggest a territory of constant reformulation. Shown alongside will be David Zink Yi’s Untitled (Architeuthis) 2010, which presents the deflated body of a five-metre-long ceramic squid isolated in a pool of blank ink. The architeuthis, a giant squid that inhabits the ocean depths and is generally only seen when its carcass floats ashore, is used by the artist to suggest the impossibility of direct observation or contact.
Teresa Margolles was born in 1963 in Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico, and now lives and works in Madrid. Cinthia Marcelle was born in 1974 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil where she continues to live. David Zink Yi was born in 1973 in Lima, Peru and is now based in Berlin. Tercerunquinto are a collective from Monterrey who formed in 1996 but now live and work in Mexico City. No Lone Zone is the latest in the Level 2 Gallery’s series of international bilateral collaborations with other art organisations around the world. The exhibition is curated by Iria Candela, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern and Taiyana Pimentel, Director, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City.
