Films Before Revolution

Argentine artist Adrián Villar Rojas (b. 1980) is already widely known for his site-specific installations: as a participant at dOCUMENTA (13), the 2011 Istanbul Biennale, the 2011 Venice Biennale, for instance, as well as in solo presentations, such as the one at the Serpentine Seckler Gallery in London and at MoMA PS1 in New York, among others, he has impressed with his works. Wherever Villar Rojas has an exhibition, he sets up a studio together with his team. During production of the exhibition, the camera is an important companion, that continually records various work situations. Some of the resulting photos are selected, and one of his colleagues then paints and draws over them. In this manner, while the actual procedure of producing the respective exhibition progresses, the present is transferred into a painted parallel world, in which work processes and works from earlier times, present and future, reality and fiction, overlap.

Films Before Revolution at Museum Haus Konstruktiv, focusses, for the first time, on Adrián Villar Rojas's multi-layered working method. The painted over photographs play a crucial part in the artistic process and the conception of the forthcoming works. In a setting specially developed for Museum Haus Konstruktiv, comprising furniture that has been deconstructed and (re-)constructed with additional elements, such as church-glass windows and neon tubes, the watercolors and reworked photographs are presented in an installational manner for the first time. They form the nucleus of an exhibition that refers to the previous ephemeral clay sculptures and the large-format sculptural installations from previous exhibitions, which without the respective preceding work processes, and without the painted-over photographs, would not have been conceivable.

The exhibition's accompanying publication records the intertwining of the various processes and inserts itself, as an autonomous artistic component, into a circular framework of working activity, artwork production, productive moments of chance, and arranged settings. For Villar Rojas, one important constant within this framework is the permanent reflection on his own artistic activity, and on how it affects his team of colleagues and the art scene.