Fredi Casco – La Fascination des Sirènes

02.06 – 23.09 / 2014
Maison de l’Amérique Latine, Paris

Curated by Albertine de Galbert

In this exhibition, which brings together in achronological fashion the works of Fredi Casco spanning the past fifteen years, it is always a matter of distance, or rather of movement, and of taking a stand.

The works encourage the “approach with reserve” – through the intriguing double images and clonophobia – as well as the “retreat with desire” – through the illegibility of the image, and the distancing of the represented object – which are, according to Didi-Huberman, the conditions of knowledge.  The viewer is encouraged to get to know, and thus to take a stand.
If “the artist today [is] less the painter of his or her time than the ethnographer of its traumas”,  the exhibition appears as an ethnographic journey into the traumas of Casco, and by extension, into those of Paraguay.

Fredi Casco,  Asuncion, 1967. Lives and works in Asuncion , Paraguay.
Visual artist, writer and director, Fredi Casco is also editor of the the South American magazine Sueño de la Razón. He is co-founder of El Ojo Salvaje ( Month of Photography in Paraguay ) and also of the independent publishing house Ediciones de la Ura in Asunción.
His work has been shown at the Biennial of Mercosur (Brazil) in 2001 and 2005 ; at the Biennial of Valencia ( Spain) in 2007 ; in the exhibition Efecto Downey, Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires in 2006 ; at the Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art in Greece in 2009 ; the Havana Biennial in 2009; at the Venice Biennale in 2013 and at the exhibition América Latina 1960 – 2013 Photographs, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris) in 2013.
His works are in permanent collections including the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; in the Stanislas and Leticia Poniatowski collection (Bogotá, Colombia), and Museo del Barrio / CAV, Asunción, Paraguay.
In 2013 he directed with Renate Costa the film Revuelta(s) for Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.