SABRINA AMRANI - ONLINE VIEWING ROOM (MAY 9 UNTIL MAY 25, 2020) Sempiterno by Edison Peñafiel

Born in Ecuador in 1985, Edison Peñafiel migrated to the United States to leave the political and economic instability of his native country. His singular style integrates video and multimedia installation to create surreal echoes of our world, environments that translate experience. His work centers the migrant as a subject, informed by his own life.

Sempiterno starts with Edison Peñafiel's attempt to create an art piece away from politics, from social criticism, in a way opposed to the rest of his works. "Somehow, the unconscious ends upbringing politics and social reality to my head again", explains the artist, because the result is, in the end, more social than ever, if possible.

Peñafiel's vision inevitably infers, through these images, on the programming of the human being within society. Each of the characters performs a sterile activity, for no apparent reason, like a life sentence. And it does it infinitely, in a clock run that is determined, in addition, with the "tick-tock" of time. “The clock is related to Pavlov's Classic Conditioning", explains the artist: "It is the bell that tells us how many hours of work, how much money we earn...”

The show seems particularly relevant and topical in the times of confinement we are living, in a vision of repeated actions day after day, of clocks and schedules marking our behaviors, a vision of isolation, alienation, confusion, image and information manipulation: “It is as if each of the panels was a building and in it, we could observe what isolated people do at home. Now we see a lot of programming within all the things that have been imposed on us. And those that are going to be imposed on us after confinement”, predicts the artist who, finally, alerts to the spy state model in which the Government carries out exhaustive or panoptic surveillance of the population.

Edison Peñafiel, Installation view of “Florida Prize in Contemporary Art 2019”, Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, USA. Courtesy of Orlando Museum of Art

Edison Peñafiel, Installation view of “Florida Prize in Contemporary Art 2019”, Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, USA. Courtesy of Orlando Museum of Art

Edison Peñafiel, Installation view of “Florida Prize in Contemporary Art 2019”, Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, USA. Courtesy of Orlando Museum of Art

Edison Peñafiel, Installation view of “Florida Prize in Contemporary Art 2019”, Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, USA. Courtesy of Orlando Museum of Art

Edison Peñafiel, Still of Sempiterno, 2017. Multichannel video and audio. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani

Edison Peñafiel, Still of Sempiterno, 2017. Multichannel video and audio. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani

Edison Peñafiel, Still of Sempiterno, 2017. Multichannel video and audio. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani

Edison Peñafiel, Still of Sempiterno, 2017. Multichannel video and audio. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani

Edison Peñafiel, Still of Sempiterno, 2017. Multichannel video and audio. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani

Edison Peñafiel, Still of Sempiterno, 2017. Multichannel video and audio. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani

Visit the exhibition Sempiterno at this link from May 9 until May 25, 2020, at the same hour.