Santiago Reyes participates in the Goodman Gallery’s online exhibition: La courte échelle (“the short ladder”), which is a French idiom that means “to give someone a hand.”
The online exhibition is curated by artists Yto Barrada, Carlos Garaicoa, and Mateo López at a time when collaboration between the various corners of the art world is more important than ever. Barrada, López and Garaicoa have selected works by nine emerging artists from the global South, whose work they follow and support.
La courte échelle marks the fourth edition of In Context, an ongoing curatorial initiative, launched in 2010 in response to South Africa hosting the World Cup and temporarily becoming “home” to the world. A common thread that runs through each edition refers to the exploitation of the tensions between the place and the body. This fourth edition is an opportunity to see works curated at an unprecedented time when the body has been “locked in”, our “place” in the world suddenly restricted to our home within a single region.
The upward stair motif directly involves the body and its place within a social hierarchy: there is the body acting as a makeshift ladder and the body balancing on top to reach a higher rung. The artists’ works included suggest an act of leaping, encouraging audiences to project themselves into an “other place,” to negotiate otherworldly spheres, and to question the structural integrity of the forms and how they might carry or support, and various ways not to bear, the body.