Ab æternō (13th Havana Biennial), 2019
(Installations Art, Photographs, Drawings and New Media Art)
Personal Exhibition at Espacio Vedado (Open Studio), collateral show of the 13th Havana Biennial.
Ab æternō (Open Studio)
Ernesto Benítez does not dissemble his interest in dusting off and re-emerging different symbols already established and legitimated by Western tradition in order to confront them with the new archetypes and liturgical paraphernalia of contemporaneity in an attempt to establish a constant tension of memory. Hence, photography, ephemeral installation proposals, environmental (Site-Specific Art), clandestine actions or net-art, among others, are excellent allies to focus the gaze on the psychology of the ubiquitous (omnipresent) man in the digital or information -not knowledge- era. After a period of retreat that Ernesto Benítez refers to as Seven Days of Silence, Ab æternō (Open Studio) takes up again a set of emblematic works of the author together with a selection of new proposals that warn the paths of his current artistic praxis.
A Finger on the Sore: Dystopia and Virtual Spaces
Digging into the Cultural Wound… In an interview published in the Artcónica portal, regarding this show, the artist expressed: “After almost ten years residing in the old continent (…), my artistic praxis, inevitably, opens up to new parallel and interrelated lines of research that cannot avoid the new realities of the quasi-dystopian era 2.0, digital or wrongly called “era of information” (or of unknowing), which is characterized by a constant struggle to model the channels and control the flows of information…“