(…) Cloistered in its lustful domes, the Faculty of Visual Arts of the High Institute of Arts, ISA (since 2010 also called University of the Arts), contributed to the main exhibition, as is already a practice since the second edition (1986), this time with a proposal entitled Con lentes de contacto (With Contact Lenses).
This “artistic-pedagogical” large-scale project arose in an essentially inclusive form, with a route through topics which went from “cultural identity” to “daily life” or “globalization”. (…)
In general, Con lentes de contacto supposed an unusual mesh, inapprehensive before the tools art critics conventionally use.
From a merely curatorial perspective, its structure could have been considered confused, dispersed among the cupolas and brick walls. But the project was something else. More suitable would be to assess it as a complex system, an enriched equation because of its formative concerns, the influence exercised in the young, the responsibility for them, the way in which a creative act could be propitiated and, at the same time, conducted.
Reaching this point, it would be hardly worthwhile to look for a full correspondence with the guidelines of the Biennial. The University of the Arts assumed the event in its own way: among the idea, art, pedagogy, what is hollow, what is convex, the ISA and experience. Further away from any ephemeral mega-exhibition, initiatives like Órbita and Casa nuestra are the ones that may mark a difference, the ones that really count with the potentiality to turn students with hypertrophied egos into artists. After all, that is all that this is about.
