Goodman Gallery presents La courte échelle (“the short ladder”), which is a French idiom meaning “to give someone a leg up”.
The online exhibition is guest-curated by artists Yto Barrada, Mateo Lopez and Carlos Garaicoa, along with the gallery, at this historic moment when collaboration across the diverse corners of the art world is more important than ever. Barrada, Lopez and Garaicoa have selected works by nine emerging artists originating from the Global South whose work they follow and support.
A common thread running through each edition relates to the mining of the tensions between place and the body. Previous editions have been guest-curated by Hank Willis Thomas and included work by Barrada.
This fourth edition is an opportunity to view works curated in an unprecedented time when the body has been “locked down”, our “place” in the world suddenly restricted to four walls within a single region.
The motif of the ladder leading upwards directly implicates the body and its place within a social hierarchy: there’s the body acting as the makeshift ladder and the body that is balancing on top of it in order to reach a higher rung.
Works by M'Barek Bouhchichi, Juliana Góngora and Santiago Reyes Villaveces each present precarious ladder-like structures, inviting bodies closer without providing instructions for negotiating them. The totem-like structures fluctuate between being lightweight and out of reach and materially robust and immediate, visibly capable of supporting the weight of a body.
Several works reflect on a physical and spiritual bridging of space - bridging realms, bridging countries. These include M'Barek Bouhchichi’s twin structures in Etude pour un monument, Mazenett Quiroga’s intertwined snake-like ouroboros forms in Gente Serpiente, the arch of Juliana Góngora’s Techo de leche y tierra and Yaima Carrazana’s Declaration Letters which refigure immigration paperwork. In Johanna Castillo’s tapestries, there is a literal attempt to stitch together safe spaces where she can unpack concerns around human connection, social constructs, identity and colonisation.
Artworks
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These varying forms collectively suggest an act of leap-frogging, encouraging audiences to project themselves into an “elsewhere”, to negotiate otherworldly spheres and question the structural integrity of forms and how these might carry or support, and variously fail to support, the body.
Artists
