11.1 – 24.2 2019
Middle school science teaches us that when an object circles an external axis, like the Earth circles the sun, it is called a revolution. This revolution gives us the seasons – long summer days, cold winter nights, migration, rebirth. But if we look to the word revolution as a political index, if we are the external axis in a narrative of Western power, what shifts do we need to bring us back into the light? At what velocity should we travel?
Our bodies, in front of and behind these lenses, are bodies at work and on display. From where you are stand- ing, you might see: the aftermath of white violence, or the ritual exchange of power, or a crime scene. A man in Trinidad holds out his hammer and offers himself before God and my camera. An ocean – the Aegean – hangs behind the oars that carried me across it.
“Order follows time’s arrow into chaos,” writes the neuroscientist Leah Kelly.
“But humans love to order. As molecules sequentially arrange themselves into structures of increasing complexity, we temporally arrange perceptions and movements into gesture, language into narrative. Life defies decay. Narrative defies forgetting. Both continue to defy erasure.”
– S.M.
Santiago Mostyn (b. San Francisco) is a Stockholm-based artist with a practice founded on politically resonant personal histories. His prints, videos, sculptures, and performances advance the position of the cultural outsider to question established social norms.
Mostyn is a graduate of Yale University, Städelschule in Frankfurt, and the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, and has exhibited internationally at venues including Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2016) and Malmö (2015), Kunsthall Stavanger (2014), Malmö Konsthall (2013), Turner Contemporary, Kent (2011), and Kunst-Werke, Berlin (2008). His work was included in the 9th edition of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art in 2017 and he is currently co-curator of the Moderna Exhibition 2018, a quadrennial survey of contemporary art in Sweden. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Interview Magazine, BBC Radio, and Creative Time Reports, among others.