Tania Candiani

In 1862, President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act, a law that chartered the Union Pacific and Central Pacific companies to connect one side of the country to the other. In 2019, in cities across the country, the 150th anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad was celebrated with a great deal of fanfare. Ogden’s Union Station on historic 25th Street became one point along the transcontinental route — a junction Union Pacific passed through on its way to Promontory and the Golden Spike. Heavily inscribed in our national mythos, the locomotive emblematizes our country’s ingenuity, its economic potency, and its dogged pursuit of manifest destiny.
The histories unaccounted for in our best-known tales of the train—the men, women, and communities transformed but ignored in the dominant narrative of the engine and the nation it built. It is their stories of the tracks that still wait to be told. The Other Side of the Tracks, a traveling exhibition, features the work of nine national and internationally recognized contemporary artists who come from these communities, their voices excluded from the triumphal tales of the track. This approach challenges the traditional narrative about trains and promotes a more inclusive and accurate view of the subject. The work of the Native American, African American, Chinese American, and Mexican art-makers in this exhibition creates a powerful vision of the railway from a perspective Americans have rarely experienced before. Additionally, the research component, which included a journey by train the participating artists took together, visiting towns and cities built by the railway, was both innovative and critical to the evolution of the artwork in the exhibition. The research expedition between artists and the show’s curator, Jorge Rojas also inspired the interdisciplinary nature of the exhibition.

This is the first large-scale exhibition of the Mexican artist Tania Candiani in Colombia and brings together a series of works around sound, artisanal processes and rivers, which speak of different latitudes but also, and above all, of Medellín. Some of her works lead along paths that merge the Earth with its human and non-human inhabitants, bring them closer, and also question the meaning that each person gives to their brief time on this planet. Loosely structured around Quantum Prelude, a two-channel octaphonic video that relates mystical, scientific and aesthetic visions of the universe, Ofrenda proposes – from sound and matter – a series of reflections on that which is primordial, both audible and the palpable

Curator: Emiliano Valdés

Desminar, curated by Gabriela Rangel, is a project that seeks to transform the viewer’s experience by focusing attention on the sound and amplified image that emanate from the floor. The installation contemplates the activation of a device that, like a deminer – which tracks the explosives left in the territory after wars – evokes the immaterial dimension of violence through sound. The work is a polyphonic lament, a generative composition that translates in real time the grooves and incisions of Fragmentos’ floor.
Desminar also contemplates the use of archival material, to link the Plaza de las Tres Culturas of Tlatelolco, in Mexico City, as another violated territory.

Commissioned by Museo Kaluz, original music by Pepe Mogt and curated by Lucia Sanromán, “Pista de Baile” is a project that explores the culture of ballroom dancing in a video installation composed of an Ultrawide screen video and tracking animation with Kinect, which synthesizes the movements of each dancer, 9 sound sculptures and engraved wooden platforms and 9 metal trumpets suspended from the ceiling.

Pepe Mogt’s original track creates variations from the halls’ iconic harmonies. Each of the tracks invites the audience to activate the piece by dancing on the wooden platforms.

The artists featured in Labor of Love, exhibition curated by Alexandra Terry, produce work that aims to expose and highlight labor practices that have been historically and systematically concealed from the public sphere. Working across a wide variety of media and using a range of conceptual approaches, the eight artists exhibited here seek to explore that which is often hidden just under the surface or kept at arm’s length: the physical, emotional, and intellectual labor that is vital to the smooth and ongoing function of innumerable aspects of our everyday lives.

Candiani participates with the three videos in the series Del Sonido de la Labor: Cantos del Trabajo, La lectora and Uno nunca ve lo que se ha hecho sino que ve lo que queda por hacer.

Candiani has worked across a wide spectrum of media to explore the fundamental relationship between people, place, labor and industry. Waterways are an enduring muse within her work. The history of Houston has long been entwined with the waterways that flow through its geography. Before the city was officially founded, this area was home to several indigenous tribes who relied on the region’s many rivers and bayous for transportation, trade, and fishing.
In the centuries to follow, the bayous and their fertile shores have nurtured agriculture, settlement, and industry, as well as the colonization, violence and exploitation that painfully became part of this landscape. In this exhibition, Candiani intersects past and present, living and lost, to channel the many voices that echo through the lifeblood of Houston.