Life Is Real Only Then, When ‘I Am’
BY FEATURED ARTIST: JUAN ARATA
Juan Arata, Life Is Real Only Then, When ‘I Am’, folded prints in wooden frame, 17.3 x 20.5 inches, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
Life is Real Only Then,
When 'I Am'
JUAN ARATA / OCT 2021 / ISSUE 10
Man is the measure of all things
but Life is Real Only Then,
When ‘I Am.’
Language is the science
that contains all other sciences.
The word: the primal symbol.
Everything is symbolic.
Hidden between folded layers
lies our reality:
we are fragmented pieces of the whole
a reconstruction of the first image
layers of accumulated in formation
different perspectives
one form.
I create as I speak
but I don’t know the higher language
just a notion of the occult.
The secret knowledge is in the mistake.
Juan Arata (b. 1976, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a multimedia artist living in Berlin who works in the fields of installation, video, sculpture, writing and painting. He sometimes performs and acts as curator of self-developed projects, which usually involves a networking mode of work or cooperation. He studied Architecture at the University of Buenos Aires, where he later taught art history and project design until 2003 when he began to work exclusively as an artist.
His work is most centered in history and language, spiritual and hard science, religion and mythology (and technology), geometry, esoteric knowledge and forms of objective communication as well as in its most outstanding makers, not because of their merits, but for the position they represent in time as inflector vectors of repetition. Through his artworks, Arata studies the different paradigms that shaped our actual state of mind and its consequent life structure.
He has been a resident at Schmiede A.I.R. (Austria), The International Young Artist Fine Art Colony of Lendava’s City Museum (Slovenia), The Pajama Factory (USA) or the Parenthesis Space Parenthesis, a nomadic artist-in-residency program which he curates and co-organizes in cooperation with four artists (to date: France, Slovenia, and Germany).
His works have been exhibited and screened at international galleries and institutions such as Transmediale (GER), Centre Culturel les Passarelles (FRA), Museum Lendava (SLO), Museum Casino Luxembourg forum for contemporary art (LUX), Torrance Art Museum (USA), and the NordArt International Exhibition (GER).