Join us for this Ignite Colloquium featuring Colombian artist Juan Obando. Obando will share his recent projects, which focus on screen mythologies, participatory fictions, and the construction of reality through digital image technologies.

Obando has worked between Colombia and the United States and currently resides in Phoenix, AZ, USA, where he is an Associate Professor at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. He holds a BA in Design and Architecture from Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) and an MFA in Electronic and Time-Based Media Art from Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN).

In his talk, Obando will revisit some of his latest works, starting with “A Bird Without A Song”, a video sculpture featured in Rencontres de La Photographie in Arles, France, and other venues worldwide. For this piece, the artist animated Tinder profile pictures of Bogotá locals to sing along to an iconic pop song. In it he considers the global traffic of personal photography as a new form of currency. He will also discuss his project for the XI Colombian National Art Prize, “La Bodeguita de La Concordia,” a site-specific installation at Galeria Santa Fe in Bogotá, in which he borrowed the typology and function of click farms — centralized networks of mobile phones producing Internet activity on demand— to subvert the expectations between social fictions and shared realities.

Obando will present his collaboration with Mexican artist Yoshua Okón in “DEMO,” an upcoming video installation at MOCA Tucson for which the duo hired the services of a public relations firm to stage a protest and reveal the central role of the crowds-for-rent industry (known as Astroturfing) in the construction of U.S. democracy. He will then close by introducing the process behind “They/Them,” a video piece that premiered in the Summer of 2023 at Centre Pompidou in Pari —currently exhibiting at Fiendish Plots in Lincoln, NE— and that is now part of the Kadist Collection (Paris, FR, and San Francisco, CA, USA). In this piece, he delves into the stock photography industry, its pervasiveness within U.S. Media, and its global impact. Obando reworked Adobe Stock video clips, maintaining their branded watermark but animating the scenes underneath with a narrative of self-critical awareness. In a surprising reversal, a deepfake is used to tell the truth.

His work aims to prompt a reflection on global media ecosystems, cultural imperialism, adversarial dynamics, and the exacerbation of the so-called arsenals of democracy. It also proposes an echoing commentary on the dialectics between images and image-makers, spectators and protagonists, and the ever-thinning lines that divide them, and us.

For more information about Obando https://www.juanobando.com/en/work

Obando’s show “They/Them” will be showing at Fiendish Plots in Lincoln, Nebraska from October 4 - 31, 2024. For more info https://fiendishplots.com/press-release