The Lost Object

carlier | gebauer is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of a recent video installation by the Argentinian artist Sebastián Díaz Morales. This will be his sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. Díaz Morales’ film and video installations confound the boundaries between reality and fiction. His work consistently attempts to displace this division through examining the linguistic and visual possibilities of narration.

The Lost Object is the final video in a trilogy that examines the complex mechanisms of how we perceive the constructed nature of reality—and how this construction is performed, both in the realm our imagination and the one of film. As curator Cuauhtémoc Medina notes in a recent monograph dedicated to Diaz Morales’ work, the artist approaches film as a “factory of simulacra,” a conceptual thread that carries throughout his trilogy, which began with Insight (2012) and was followed by Suspension (2014).

A slow, steady shot travels into the set of The Lost Object, accompanied by the din of a whirring film reel that seems to methodically introduce the viewer into a world of artifice: a soundstage containing the set of a curiously dated, yet nonetheless anonymous room. The scenario slowly begins to unravel, disarticulating both the language and apparatus of filmmaking. Following Jean Baudrillard’s notion that the world has disappeared behind its own representation and therefore its impossible to return to it, The Lost Object proposes a new world in which fiction and reality merge into one single element. In this universe, fiction is autonomous and auto-generates itself.

Sebastián Díaz Morales (b.1975, Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina) lives and works in Amsterdam. His work is currently on view in Sonsbeek ’16 and his solo exhibition Ficcionario IV opens at Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen in mid-October. Previous iterations of Ficcionario have been exhibited at Le Fresnoy (2015) and CAC Vilnius (2014). Díaz Morales has additionally exhibited in prestigious international venues such as Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou; Stedelijk Museum and De Appel, Amsterdam; Art in General, New York City; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Bienale São Paulo; Biennale of Sydney; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; MUDAM, Luxembourg and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon—and is the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou; Tate Modern; Fundación Jumex, Mexico City; Foundazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Sammlung-Goetz, Munich; and the Fundacion de Arte Moderna, Museu Berardo, Lisbon. In 2009 he was awarded with a Guggenheim Fellowship.