Pablo Helguera is an interdisciplinary artist with an interest in socially engaged art and performance. His work as an educator has often influenced his work as an artist, often incorporating language and literature to articulate and address local cultural and social issues.
In Strange Oasis, Kent Fine Art becomes the stage and platform for new iterations and re-stagings of the artist’s recent interventions, which took place throughout the Americas and Europe. Some of the projects presented include Société Civile pour l’Enterrement de Pensées Mortes for Rectangle, Brussels, 2013, Nuevo Romancero Nuevomejicanofor Site Santa Fe’s thematic exhibition “Unsettled Landscapes,” and Vita Vel Regula (Rules of Life) for the Renata Bianconi Gallery in Milan.
The exhibition’s title comes from the essay on the phenomenology of play titled “Oasis of Happiness” by German philosopher Eugen Fink. In his essay, Fink refers to play as a “strange oasis, an enchanted rest-spot in [man’s] agitated journey.” Helguera’s interventions, which use history, geography, and language, create parenthetical experiences, projections into other places, times, and physical spaces. According to the artist, the interactive projects in this exhibition come from the interest in creating “parenthetical experiences” that extract the viewer from daily routine by engaging them in leisurely activities that can acquire very personal interpretations.
The various projects presented here address geography, location, and time, focusing on the significance of human relationships and the limits of communication and language.
Where: Kent Fine Art – 210 Eleventh Avenue – New York
When: until March 14th, 2015
