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69 Capel Street, West Melbourne VIC 3003

Open 12pm-5pm, Thursday - Sunday

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About

Kings Artist-Run provides a location for contemporary art practice, supporting distinctive experimental projects by artists at all stages of their careers.
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KINGS Artist-Run acknowledges the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we operate.

We offer our respect to Elders both past and present and extend this offer to all Australian First Nations people.

Black_Box: no proof/no doubt

Alejandra Ramírez León
Kenneth Coronado
Pablo Cianca

26 October 2019–16 November 2019

Alejandra Ramírez León, Puedo escribir cualquier cosa de cualquier imagen. (I can say anything about any image.) Video. 4:31 min. 2017

I can say anything about any image is not a biographical sequence, a historical documentary or a home video found in 1994. It is closer – to perhaps – it being a mockery towards the passivity of the look. The parody – that is – as a point of escape, but it isn’t that, either. Through a humorous and emotional way, the project is inscribed around questions regarding power. The power of images and of those who enunciate it using images.

It poses a sequence that is repeated three times, while in each passing sequence, a new narrative is proposed. In this way, three different narrative lines, on the same images, create a microcosm that is extracted from more sophisticated levels of operation and manipulation of images.

Can the sarcastic and light-ish tone of a few lines about “a woman” and of “colonization processes” be violent? These subtle collateral aspects accompany the axial problem: enunciation is power. What is at stake here, is the power of the statement and positioning we take; and what we say and how we say it. Framing this from a perspective of empathy and from the playful manipulation that audio-visual technologies allow, is perhaps a way of digesting a daily problem.

Kenneth Coronado, Lugares que nacen para ser olvidados (Places that are born to be forgotten). Video, 4:28 min. 2019.

What are landscapes for? Does the origin of an image determine its use or its meaning? Once images exist, what should be done with them? The video tells an event, something apparently unbearable and special in equal parts is taking place. The video shows the creation of a picturesque landscape.

While its birth happens again and again without materialising it, a monologue travels through the different actors, staging, details and clichés that accompany such a task.

Nobody is the protagonist of this landscape, and yet it is a moment that many seem to feel satisfied with. These pictures exist with the tacit agreement of being doomed to accumulate dust. Be this in our memory, the retina or on a shelf.

Pablo Cianca, Conocí Fantasmas (I Met Ghosts), Video, SD (4:3), 5min17s, 2019

Conocí Fantasmas (I met Ghosts) is a compilation of discarded and unused footage recorded with my first camera. Put together as a way of understanding how images led me to discover places and people that now speak as ghosts captured in them.

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  • She studied Visual Arts with an emphasis on Pictorial Design at the University of Costa Rica. Shas complemented her training with workshops and residencies such as Rapaces Artist Residency (2015). Espira La Espora in Nicaragua with Patricia Belli (Nicaragua) and Rodrigo Rada (Bolivia) and the Performing Arts Laboratory with emphasis on SCENOGRAPHIC SPACE taught by the LABMAE Memory Arts Performing Laboratory, among others. She has shown her work collectively, at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design MADC, Artflow Gallery, Despacio, C.R.A.C. Art Studio, Francisco Amighetti Gallery, Institute of Mexico Costa Rica, French Alliance, Terminal Gallery, the Cultural Center of Spain both in San José and Managua, Nicaragua. The Design Center in Madrid and José Antonio Gallery in Havana, Cuba. She won the first prize for Inquieta Imagen 2017 ultra_contaminados with the video work I can say anything about any image. This work is part of the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design MADC, Costa Rica.
  • Kenneth Coronado Hernández. He was born in San José, Costa Rica, in 1991. He studied Visual Art with an emphasis on Painting at the University of Costa Rica. His work uses the idea of landscape to speculate on the role of the image as a mediator in the construction of individual experiences and these with the environment. He works with multiple media, particularly based on collage and painting. He lives and works in San José, Costa Rica.
  • Cianca knows things about the cameras of the past. Since the beginning of his university studies, he has focused on film. More in-depth explorations over the course of his studies led his interest for other ways of filming and creating that moved beyond fiction. This led him to documentaries. Finding old video cameras in his grandmother's house was a good start. A TV and a collection of videotapes to go through. He began working with home movies, naturally drawn to memory. Pablo Cianca was born in San José in 1994, he lives and works in Guadalupe, Costa Rica.