Rogelio López Cuenca, Elo Vega Inaugurate Anilla MAC Hall in Santiago de Chile

Spanish artists Rogelio López Cuenca (Nerja, Malaga, 1959) and Elo Vega (Huelva, 1967), who have worked together in different projects over the years, have just inaugurated, with their show "Historia de dos ciudades / Saharawhy", the brand-new Anilla MAC hall, located at the second floor of the MAC – Museum of Contemporary Art - Parque Forestal, ruled by the Arts Faculty, University of Chile in Santiago de Chile. This hall, scheduled and curated by platform Anilla Cultural MAC, will join, from now on, the permanent program of the museum and it will be dedicated to hybrid works that can be pointed out in the frontiers of art-science, sonorous arts, network art, fiction videos and documentaries, as well as performances.

This couple of Spanish artists, invited by CRAC Valparaíso, the Arts Faculty of the University of Chile and MAC, open Anilla MAC Hall with video 'Historia de dos ciudades' (2010) and website 'Saharawhy' (2012). Both projects critically tackle the indifference of the Spanish society in terms of the problem faced by the Saharan people in Western Sahara (north of Africa), native inhabitants of that territory and the last Spanish colony, whose process of territorial autonomy and the freedom of its people remains unsolved. The artists "try to establish a debate on the concepts of extraterritoriality and expatriation, and to do so, they use fragments of recordings on the life of 'particular and exceptional' people, thus outlining an alter-geographic map to build a multinational link", according to the press release.

Rogelio López Cuenca, who is represented by galleries Juana de Aizpuru (Madrid) and Pedro Oliveira (Oporto), is a poet and visual artist. His work deals with the analysis of languages used by the mass media, by applying procedures related to visual arts, literature or social sciences. López Cuenca, Andalusia Award of Fine Arts (1992) and Iniciarte (2008), among others, has carried out several solo shows, and "Efigies y Fantasmas" was the last one, a project awarded with Daniel Vázquez Díaz scholarship, which also counted on the collaboration of Elo Vega and was displayed at the Museum of Huelva, in May 2013. Furthermore, his works have been included in such exhibitions as contemporary art biennales of Johannesburg (1994), Manifesta 1 (1996), Lima (2002), São Paulo (2002), Istanbul (2003) and Guatemala (2012), as well as public and private collections like Reina Sofía’s in Madrid, Macba in Barcelona, Musac in León, Artium in Vitoria or La Caixa Foundation collection in Barcelona.

As for visual artist Elo Vega, who is not linked to any gallery, she studied Fine Arts at the University of Castilla-La Mancha and graduated in Advanced Studies on New Cultural and Artistic Practices. Vega’s work, from a critical approach, tackles social and political matters, as well as cultural analysis by means of an artistic practice that includes photography, moving images and network art. She has participated in several individual and collective exhibitions in Spain, France, Mexico, Guatemala, Denmark and Nicaragua, such as "Expanded Ecology, Series of Videoart Memento Naturae, environmental approaches on video" at Spain’s Cultural Center in Mexico, "Let the Children Come to Me" at CISAS in Managua (Nicaragua), "Silence and Policy", at the Arts Faculty of Madrid’s Autonomous University, or "Atopia. Art and City in the 21^st Century" at the CCCB of Barcelona. These shows took place in 2010.

Source: ARTEINFORMADO