FELIPE MUJICA: "Galería Chilena Says: Everything is Going to Be Alright!?"

Thursday, 4 September 2014, 6 p.m.
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana

You are kindly invited to attend the lecture by a Chilean artists who lives in New York Felipe Mujica on Thursday, 4 September 2014, at 6 p.m. at the seminar of the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova. The lecture in English is part of the Politicization of Friendship exhibition program.

Mujica will talk about the Galería Chilena (Galchi), which was founded in Santiago de Chile by him and two other young local artists aged between 24 and 27: Diego Fernández and Joe Villablanca. It opened as an independent art space on December 13, 1997, with a
24-hour exhibition on the top floor of a house in a residential district of Santiago.

Galería Chilena (GCH) promotes the work of young artists through the organization of exhibitions and talks. The main feature of GCH is the lack of a physical space. Their shows have happened mostly in commercial locations that are dealt directly with the estate agents through mutual benefit agreements, ?cultural visibility trade? or simple diplomatic maneuvers within an entrepreneurial disguise. Originally, the nomadic strategy of GCH worked as a critique, question and expansion to the Santiago contemporary art circuit, which in the late 1990s was composed mostly of either very traditional commercial galleries or government funded non-profit spaces (with unclear curatorial decisions). GCH?s nomadism was as much an economical solution as it was a takeover of the growing condition of Santiago in the years of transitional democracy and macroeconomic wealth ? we used new/unused spaces that where left behind. By now, GCH?s mobility and economy of mediums has evolved, and moved away from the gallery frame to become more of a collaborative instance for group experimentation and encounters; a non-place for discussion, a non-place for joining forces.

Excerpt from CONDOROS/MISTAKES press release, London 2004