Beyond the Poseidon Adventure
curated by Ximena Cuevas, Mexico City
Tuesday, March 4 at the Chicago Cultural Center 6:30pm
Saturday, March 8 at Heaven Gallery 9:00pm

We live in times which confuse reality and fiction: even the “veracity” of historic events becomes doubtful when our media-saturated perception renders them indistinguishable from movies or television. We can no longer tell if we are characters in some huge movie, or whether the food we eat is only props. This program is about that transformation from reality to representation: the mental representations we may have of our world; the lies in our world which may be transformed into truths, or vice versa; the very illusion of daily existence, in which simple things alter a truth, shake it to its foundations until it is transformed. The videos included here take recognizable media out of context, giving them alternative meanings, throwing into question our natural means of perception. These videos take the languages of film and television and use them to suggest other possibilities.

"True and False" - 16mm - 1.30 min - Anonymous
"Rambo, Artemio's cut" - VHS - 16.30 min - Artemio
"There is no remedy" - 35 mm - 1 min.- Lorenza Manriquez
"Yepa Yepa" - DV - 4 min. - Miguel Calderon
“The Martian that I saw" - DV - 1 min. - Carolina Esparragoza
"Rabbit in the forest" - DV - 1 min. - F/X
"Spider man" - DV - 1 min - F/X
"Possessed" - DV - 2 min.- Miguel Calderon
"Vitesse revolvers" - 35mm - 3 min. - Lorenza Manriquez
"12 Violent deaths of contemporary artists. volume 1" - Video 8 - 4.30 min.-
Héctor Pacheco
"Mine #1" - DV - 3.30 min. - Teresa Serrano
"Mine #2" - DV - 4 min. - Teresa Serrano
"Mambo Queen" - Betacam - 3 min. - Grace Quintanilla
"The Big Whack" - 16mm/DV - 2.30 min.- Ricardo Nicolayevsky

Ximena Cuevas is obsessed with the micro movements of daily life, with the border between truth and fiction, with the "impossibility" of reality. Her work relentlessly seeks out the layers of lies covering the everyday representations of reality and systematically explores the fictions of national identity and gender. It redefines the meaning of documentary. Her videos have been shown in festivals such The New York Film Festival, Sundance, Berlin, and Montreal, and she was the featured artist at "Video Viewpoints" in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has been an invited speaker at numerous events, including those sponsored by the Pacific Film Archives in San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the Guggenheim in New York, and most recently in June of 2000 at the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Among the many grants she has received are those from the FONCA (Mexican National Endowment for Culture and the Arts), the Eastman Kodak Worldwide Independent Filmmaker Product Grant, and the Rockefeller, MacArthur, Lampiada grant. Her most recent work includes Dormimundo, a documentary about the discomfort of being, with which she was the guest artist of the Central New York Programmers Group fall tour of 2000. In 2001 the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquires 9 videos of Ximena Cuevas for its permanent collection. The first time the museum has a Mexican video artist in its collection.