NEWS ARCHIVE
Interview - March 12, 2018
Also, Susan Wiggins questions Juliana Laffitte for Some Serious Business' #FiftyQuestions series.
Review - March 9, 2018
We are excited to be Pick of the Week in Artillery Magazine. Annabel Osberg writes, "Like a grim mishmash of fairytales gone wrong, this installation feels as though you’re not supposed to be there—unless to be sacrificed."
News - March 9, 2018
Natalie Pashaie's review of Mondongo's exhibition can be read at ARTNOWLA.
ArtNews
covered Mondongo's second performance at Track 16.
February 27, 2018
Video of Mondongo's Performances at Automata in Chinatown
February 20, 2018
MONDONGO - PERFORMANCE AT TRACK 16
Thursday, February 22nd from 7:30-9:00pm
Free. No RSVP required.
Note: It is not necessary to arrive at 7:30pm to attend and experience. The performance is cyclical and evolving.
January 7, 2018
MONDONGO – PERFORMANCE at AUTOMATA
PERFORMANCE at AUTOMATA
Saturday, January 20th from 7-10pm
Sunday, January 21st from 6-8pm
AUTOMATA
504 Chung King Court
Los Angeles, CA 90012
The Argentine art collective Mondongo, just coming off participation in exhibitions in the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time LA-LA series, are back in Los Angeles in 2018 with a performance-installation at Automata in collaboration with Track 16. The performances are on January 20th and 21st will be ongoing throughout the evening. They are free and open to the public.
Mondongo's most recent installations included a weekly performance during their Fall exhibition at Barro in Buenos Aries and daily performances at Arco last February in Madrid where they built a forced perspective version of the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles with their own embellishments that set the local of the performances.
Juliana Laffitte and Manuel Mendanha are the duo that make up Mondongo, which blends ephemeral performances with intricate, sculptural paintings. The Buenos Aires-based collective formed in 1999.
News - November 10, 2017
HOME—So Different, So Appealing heads to Museum of Fine Arts Houston
Mondongo's epic altar piece "Polyptych of Buenos Aires” now heads from LACMA to MFAH as part of HOME—So Different, So Appealing.
Whereas the Ghent Altarpiece depicts the city of God above, and the world of men below, Polyptych of Buenos Aires features a stock-market chart dotting the sky above Villa 31, a vast shantytown that surrounds the main train station in Buenos Aires. Villa 31 is located close to the city’s financial district and “just 10 blocks from the opera,” Mondongo member Manuel Mendanha notes.
Juliana Laffitte, another member of the collective, grew up near the shantytown. Both artists say it is important to them to show how people live in their home country, because nearly a third of Argentina’s population falls under the poverty line.
The exhibition features U.S. Latino and Latin American artists from the late 1950s to the present who use the universal concept of “home” as a lens through which to view socioeconomic and political changes in the Americas over the past seven decades. More than 100 works by 39 artists explore the differences and similarities within art related to immigration and political repression; dislocation and diaspora; and personal memory and utopian ideals.
The exhibition brings together U.S. artists of Cuban, Mexican, and Puerto Rican origin in a dialogue with artists from Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela, among other countries. Despite the political, cultural, and religious affinities they share, these two broad and highly diverse groups have been, until now, treated separately from one another.
Across a variety of media—including painting, sculpture, installation, performance, photography, film, and video—these artists examine and interpret one of the most basic social concepts by which individuals, families, nations, and regions understand themselves in relation to others. In the process, these works of art also offer an alternative narrative of postwar and contemporary art.
Mondongo
Polyptych of Buenos Aires, 2014/2016
Plasticine and mixed media on wood.
144 x 91 inches (variable width)
News – September 29, 2017
DTLA
Track 16 Gallery is pleased to announce our move to downtown Los Angeles. A week from today we will be opening the exhibition DTLA in our new home in the Bendix Building in the heart of the Garment District just off Santee Alley. Please join us for a reception on Friday, October 6th from 7-9pm.
The Pacific Standard Time LA-LA series has engulfed the Southern California art world this Fall. The Getty organized exhibitions challenge us to expand our view of the world by narrowing our focus on Latin American and Chicano art. For Track 16’s inaugural DTLA exhibit we are focusing on the Latin American artists who changed how we see the world.
September 9, 2017
Mondongo & Pedro Alvarez in the upcoming exhibition How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney
Curated by Ruben Ortiz Torres and Jesse Lerner
How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America and Latin America’s Disney
is an attempt to engage with the idea that there are no clean boundaries in art, culture, and geography, and to deconstruct how such notions are formed and disputed. For over seventy-five years, the Walt Disney Company has continuously looked to Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America for content, narratives, and characters, beginning with Donald Duck’s first role in the Mexican-themed Don Donald (1937). The 1971 text by Chilean scholars Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart—Para leer al Pato Donald—considered Disney comic books as a form of cultural imperialism, and the curators have used its arguments as a starting point to show that Disney cannot be seen as something simply exported to the rest of the Americas, and passively received. Like any other cultural force or mythology in Latin America, Disney imagery has always been quickly reinterpreted, assimilated, adapted, cannibalized, syncretized, and subverted in popular culture and the fine arts.
Spanning painting, photography, graphic work, drawing, sculpture, and video, as well as folk art and vernacular objects, joint exhibitions at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House and the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State LA explore this history and the ways Latin American artists have responded to, played with, re-appropriated, and misappropriated Disney iconography.
Exhibition Dates: September 09 - January 14, 2017
Pedro Álvarez
Cinderella's Maid (w/blue birds), 1998
Oil on canvas
45 x 57 in.
