Visiting artist and scholar lecture series | Yoshua Okón
Event description
- Arts and entertainment
- Free
- Open to the public
Visiting artist and scholar lecture series | Yoshua Okón
March 19 | 6 p.m. | Grant Street Studios
Yoshua Okón was born in Mexico City in 1970, where he currently lives. His work, like a series of near-sociological experiments executed for the camera, blends staged situations, documentation and improvisation, and questions habitual perceptions of reality and truth, selfhood, and morality. In 2002, he received an MFA from UCLA with a Fulbright scholarship.
Okón will present a selection of his works from the past 25 years, placing special emphasis on the strategies used to actively engage and implicate the public. He will discuss how, through the use of tensions between documentary and fiction, performativity, black humor and found situations, he has explored systemic violence.
In addition, Okón will be discussing his latest work, which will be produced this Fall at Biosphere 2 in Arizona. This will include a series of sculptures and videos that reflect on symbiosis, the complexity of our planet's ecosystems and their entanglements. By exploring ideas around space colonization in the context of the current environmental crisis and mass extinction of species, this new piece will address human hubris.
His work is included in the collections of Tate Modern, Hammer Museum, LACMA, Colección Jumex, and MUAC, among others.
Image: “Elephant,” fiberglass sculpture, 11.5 x 5.2 x 5.6 feet. Installation view, ProyectosMonclova, Mexico City, Mexico.