Solo show: Gabriel Rossell-Santillán - "Wirraritary - rundherum die Wüste" (over)

	Gabriel Rossell-Santillán, Huicholes-Archiv at Ethnologische Museum Berlin-Dahlem, 2008. Photo: Kathrin Sonntag

Parrotta Contemporary Art - Stuttgart Parrotta Contemporary Art - Stuttgart Augustenstr. 87-89 70197 Stuttgart Germany (city map) Send E-mail tel +49 (0)711 - 69 94 79 10 www.parrotta.de

PRESS RELEASE

PARROTTA CONTEMPORARY ART STUTTGART BERLIN PRESENTS:

Gabriel Rossell-Santillán 'Wirraritary - rundherum die Wüste'

Opening: Friday, 13th. February 2009, at 7 pm
Exhibition Period: bis 28th. March 2009
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 2 - 7 pm

Gabriel Rossell Santillán »Wirraritari, rundherum die Wüste«

In his photography, videos, objects and installations, artist Gabriel Rossell Santillán born in Mexico in 1977 and living currently in Berlin, struggles with the transformation of cultural knowledge. The assembly and structure of his work comes out of his studies in painting, drawing, literature and social sciences.

What characterizes his working style and the way he handles material, is on one side his precise and clear context and on the other side his open and organic approach. His work is based on specific research and ethnographic field work done locally in Stuttgart, in Mexico (Nayarit) in the Huichol community and at the Ethnologischen Museum in Berlin-Dahlem. In his Huichol project he developed a method in which he connects, in a delicate manner, the portrayal of rituals and cultural practices of the Huicholes with his ethnological knowledge. Although Gabriel Rossell Santillán's artistic interests go far beyond only formal and aesthetic questions, he nevertheless manifests a clear and profound connection with historical, anthropological, social and cultural contexts maintaining the characteristics of his current artistic mediums and materials. For example, he uses a traditionally produced Mexican sugar icing as a projection screen for his video work, creating a soft, peculiar shimmer. A colony of ants however, over the duration of the exhibition tear apart and eat away at the sugar, in which the medium stays consistent with its message - a narration of and about the Huicholes - in a steady process of transformation.