PATRICIA BENTANCUR UY
Patricia Bentancur (b. 1963) is a Montevideo-based artist and curator. She studied architecture at the Universidad de la República and at the ETSAM/Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid. Patricia has degrees in engraving from the Montevideo Engraving Club and in design of scenic spaces and lighting from the Multidisciplinary School of Theater Design (EMAD). She studied Semiotics and Philosophy of Art with Dr. Dorothee Baur Willert and was a Researcher of the Academic Program/Fullbright (1996-2000). She completed the Arts Management Master Program at New York University and is an Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Art (US). Patricia has exhibited extensively around the world, at places including Southern Latitude-Film Makers (NY), Aurora Gallery, (Barcelona), FIVA/International Video Art Festival, National Museum of Jordan; International Experimental Film Festival (DOBRA), Mercosur Biennial (Chile), Havana Biennial, Ibero-American Biennial of Mexico and the Belfort Festival.
Lands_NO FLAGS, 2021
Starting from conceptualist strategies, works are put into dialogue that facilitate the reading of contemporary problems that are invisible and of different scales. Global and local scenarios coexist to decentralize the gaze and relativize, in an equally poetic and critical way, the apparent segmentation that can make us believe that a problem is alien to us, just because it is not close in its geography, culture or religion. This work can be understood more as a contextualization of existence than as a record of it. From pieces of flags reconfigured in a new system, a perceptual distortion is generated that proposes us to reflect on concepts assumed without further questioning. The significance of certain symbols and their political and social load uncritically establishes the sense of territorial and cultural belonging. Rarely, do we review the aspects and problems generated by this geopolitical imposition. There are spaces – symbolic – that are built outside the established borders: an intermediate space, which does not necessarily belong to one or another place. Could the rupture of these edges – belonging, political and symbolic – imply some form of progress in our culture and the conflicts we face in contemporary societies?