Tamar Guimaraes weaves the labyrinth of art on a fabric

Originally posted on November 11, 2019, on Radio COCOA

Tamar Guimaraes brings you a challenge: decipher her work. Her exhibition, "El Tejido Hablado" (The Spoken Fabric), awaits you until December 26 at the Casa del Alabado Museum for you to take a look and come up with your wildest theory about what it means. Here we tell you ours.

The Spoken Fabric is a 20-meter-long loom that carries the plot of a conversation between the artist Tamar Guimaraes and her curator. What does the fabric say? It is not known. What we do know is that, just as walls talk, so do textiles.

Art is language, and the more postmodern we become, there is also more diversified the ways of telling a story. Standing in front of a work of contemporary art almost always means having a huge question mark in your head and simultaneously nodding as if everything were crystal clear. Sometimes art is ineffable: it cannot be explained, it cannot be translated, but there it is.

Guimaraes's work proposes to explore pre-Columbian art - the clay pots, funeral urns, and ceramic figures- from the untranslatable. Tamar recorded a conversation with her curator and wove the sound vibrations onto a 20-meter fabric. Although we cannot hear the voices, there is something this fabric is shouting: that we cannot read, understand, or know what pre-Columbian art means, and perhaps, no art at all.

Then, that contemporary art painting with a single large paint stain that you can't decipher is just as mysterious as any other piece of pre-Columbian art. It would be worth asking if perhaps all art is like this. There is a piece of art hanging on the wall or a film on the screen, and you can try to read it, but that piece of art is no longer the same one the artist made, that piece of art is yours.

The work of art, whichever it is, allows you to see the lines, shapes, and patterns that present an inaccurate reflection of what the author intended, and a much more accurate one about what you, as a spectator, intend to understand.

The creator of this labyrinth is Tamar Guimaraes, a Brazilian visual artist, born in Belo Horizonte and a resident of Denmark. Her works have traveled around the world, being exhibited in museums such as the Tate Modern in the UK or the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. In addition to making ultra-mysterious installations like The Spoken Fabric, Tamar is a renowned filmmaker.

In her films, she has explored themes related to socio-cultural realities in Brazil. Among them is the film Canoas (2010), which "criticizes the characterization of Brazil as an erotic paradise in which desire transcends class and race stratification," in the words of curator and writer Stefanie Hessler.

With this new piece, Guimaraes both baffles and seduces all of us mortals still searching to understand art. "The invitation is speculative in nature: it does not want to generate answers, it does not believe in correct approaches. It only seeks to respond, under a new light, to a long, delicate history with few certainties," say the organizers of the event.

To play detective with Tamar, you can visit the exhibition until December 26 at the Casa del Alabado Museum, located in the Historic Center of Quito. For more information, you can write to educacion@alabado.org . Bring your notebook, the investigation may take a while.