JHAFIS QUINTERO @ Moving Image Art Fair, New York, USA

Jhafis Quintero, Hombre que camina, 2013

JHAFIS QUINTERO @ Moving Image Art Fair, New York, USA
Ten Years in Jail

Opening Thursday March 6 2014, 6pm
Fair : March 6 – 9, 2014
Waterfront New York Tunnel
269, 11th Avenue
Between 27th and 28th Streets
New York, NY 10001

Jhafis Quintero (born in 1973, Panama) has represented Panama at the Venice Biennial in 2013 and his work is shown for the first time in the USA at Moving Image Art Fair.

Jhafis Quintero has previously spent ten years in jail (hence the title of his show), and became an artist while in prison. For him, creativity has been « essential to survive in jail », according to his own words, and « art and crime are twins in subversion ». Quintero however in no way is trying to awake our (com)passion for the victim he doesn’t want to be. « Jail », in the works by Quintero, means as much our psychological, social or emotional jails as any physical, « real » jail. Quintero works on a series of ten haiku-like videos, (one for each year spent in jail), of which the first six will be shown at Moving Image. Each « haiku » is based on a very specific sensorial experience, and Quintero confronts us to our own imprisonments, inability to communicate and fears, to our own anxieties, to our own body.

The power of Jhafis Quinteros’ videos lies in the fundamental transformation of a personal experience in a universal one, the exact type of conversion that makes the artist tell us « the mystical truth ». Jhafis Quintero’s art is not as much about jail than it is about our human condition.

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