Chief Curator Heather Pesanti at the Contemporary Austin assembled works of 11 artists addressing identity and culture at the Jones Center on Congress Avenue in the Exhibition The Sorcerer’s Burden: Contemporary Art and Anthropological Turn. Media includes film, video, painting, sculpture and performance with imaginative, playful, humor and satirical illusion to magic and sorcery. The group exhibition reflects on the human condition and Western societies history of colonialism. The artistic idea of primitivism, the exotic, rituals, and the concept of otherness are addressed in the works showing the intersection of the disciplines of art and anthropology. Pesanti’s resume uniquely qualifies her for this Exhibition with an undergraduate degree in art history and master’s degree in Ethnology and Museum Ethnography from Oxford.
The Sorcerer’s Burden includes an international group of contemporary artists whose work addresses the culture issues related to race, identity, colonialism, religion and politics with new perspectives while bridging the two disciplines. The similarities of art and anthropology include curiosity about culture, the impulse to collect and the interplay of fact and fiction. The artwork is experimental, exploratory and contemporary. The exhibition is organized into four themes: Ritual, Magic, Myth, Farther Afield, The Spyglass of Anthropology and Things.
Some of the works include artist Theo Eshetu (born in 1958 in London, lives and works in Berlin) who shows a theater size video Adieu Les Demoiselles that projects Picasso’s famous painting and women of different ethnicities using their bodies with African mask like faces of Picasso’s painting presenting layers of imagery and history. Nathan Mabry (born in 1978 in Durango, Colorado, lives and works in Los Angeles, California) presents terra-cotta sculptures of pre-Columbian vessels on wooden boxes resembling those of Donald Judd after he studies pre-Columbian structures. Ruben Ochoa (born 1974 in Oceanside, California, lives and works in Los Angeles) presents a combination of paintings and sculptures. He uses the materials of landscape and urban construction. His paintings include rust on linen over panel and metal sculptural forms. Other artists in the exhibiton include Ed Atkins, Cameron Jamie, Kapwani Kiwanga, Maire Lorenz, Dario Robleto, Shimabuku and Iulia Wachtel.
The anthropological basis of the works of art is easily identified without much explanation as they explore history, culture, identity and material. Theo Eshetu’s appropriation of Picasso’s painting creates the historical connection between visual art and Western culture’s fascination with the exotic. The focus of the exhibition drifts away from scientific observation and explores the various forms of media that can be used to project the allusion of elements of anthropology. Each artist provides a social and geographically different perspective on the history of humans through visual media while the exhibition title and location provide the context for the viewer to recognize the works as fictive.