n.e.w.s. is a collective online platform for the analysis and development of art-related activity, drawing upon contributions from around the globe, bringing together different voices, accents and outlooks from the North, East, West and South. | Read more..

Troca-troca # 2: Alexandre Vogler

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When searching for living artists in Rio whose practice could be placed within the parameters of Troca-trocas, I was caught up by the work of Alexander Vogler (Rio de Janeiro, 1975), who for the past years has dealt with issues that construct the collective imagery of his context; let it be by making a mockery of a zeppelin launched in 2002 by the governor of Rio de Janeiro as a surveillance strategy to help police battle violence (Olho grande, 2002) or by revealing the non secular moralist government of a city with an evangelic majority, who upraised radically against a large size drawing on a nearby mountain that almost led to the artists’ imprisonment (Tridente de Nova Iguacu, 2006). www.alexandrevogler.com In 2007, Vogler created a workshop that consisted of stimulating people to draw with colour pencils whatever they pleased on a Playboy-brazil poster that the artist had reproduced massively. The result was silly yet monstrous drawings suggesting that although in cultural industry there are hegemonic representations of desire and beauty concerning the female body as object of desire, the amateur drawings/graffitis made by the workshop’s participants over the Playboy celebrity posing within the archetypical image of the magazine, may perhaps be revealing one's 'real’ obscure and repressed desire. When shown at a gallery space, every intervened poster has a peculiar monstrosity; uncovering the plurality of subjectivities and therefore attesting that sexual drive, although culturally rendered, is still highly a peculiar individual expression. For the reader of Troca-troca’s book, Vogler’s aforementioned work may seem misleading within the project’s statement, if that is the case it is important to clear out that this curatorial platform seeks practices WITHIN (not about) the context of what has been named the Gay International (see statement first page of Book); an ideology for civilian representation that nowadays renders the process of identification regarding gender and sexuality for both heterosexuals and homosexuals. For straight men and women, the social visibility and participation of those cast within LGBT categories, serves as either an antithesis or as simple form of ‘othering’; when someone states and proclaims its sexuality, “I’m straight”, that person simultaneously denies that he or she is Gay, and vise versa. Inti Guerrero