Dimensions Variable (DV) presents a solo project titled Who Kills Ai Weiwei by Cuban-born, Miami-based artist Francisco Masó. The exhibition opens on June 25 and runs through September 10, 2022 in the Main Gallery.
What happens when a dissident artwork is owned by the regime it criticizes? How do you avoid the use of your work as part of government political propaganda? Is it possible to legally frame the dynamics of reception, consumption, and circulation of your practice? Taking these questions as a point of departure, Masó reflects on the ethical sense of political art through the presentation of three recent projects: Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces (2017 – ongoing), Placing Political Art (2020-2021), and Time Specific Marked Paintings (2022).
Based on documentary photographs from online archives about scenes of repression in Cuba, both series Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces and Time Specific Marked Paintings generate a geometric archive of striped polo shirt patterns worn by the secret police. During the show, Placing Political Art is activated, allowing the audience to borrow an artwork presented in the exhibition for a period of 15 days.
Essay:
Francisco Masó Connects the Political and the Personal at Dimensions Variable by Isabella Marie Garcia.
The artist about the exhibition:
Ai Weiwei embodies the iconography of the political artist worldwide. Probably China’s most famous living artist and its most visible political dissident, he has denounced government corruption and human rights violations in the country. Because of his openly critical position to the Chinese Communist leadership and advocacy for democracy and freedom of expression, he has been arrested, beaten, isolated, and prohibited from traveling outside China. For me, it was crucial to offer certain codes that could widen the frame of interpretation regarding the exhibition topic to different audiences. Ai Weiwei is a metonymic resource to reflect on the ethical sense of political art in front of the totalitarian systems’ politics and on the civic responsibility of the political artist in the process of knowledge production and imagination.
During the one-month residency in the Everglades, I had enough time to research and solidify my thoughts on political art. Some of the paintings exhibited in Who Kills Ai Weiwei, specifically those titled “Time Specific Marked Paintings” (2022 – ongoing), were created after the residency as a result of that time allowed for reflection. While researching the presence of the Afro-Caribbean and African-American communities in the Everglades and its relationship with the Pink Bollworm infestation in the wild cotton plants, I read books about Marc Rothko, art conservation, and dry pigments. The exhibition resulted from the DV-Airie Award, which gave me the opportunity to realize a solo project in Dimensions Variable.
The process for selecting the photographs placed in front of the paintings from the series “Aesthetic register of Covert Forces” doesn’t happen after the work is finished, but it constitutes the initial reference for creating the painting. The first phase of this Project is searching for images on the Internet that show secret agents and government officers using techniques of police control in front of dissident groups on the Island. In this case, the photograph is not a mere aesthetic gesture but the expressed intention on my end to share hidden information for all to see and learn to decodify the strategies of surveillance we face in our daily lives.