{"id":11911,"date":"2019-01-24T15:08:22","date_gmt":"2019-01-24T14:08:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.janinebeangallery.com\/en\/?page_id=11911"},"modified":"2020-09-23T15:18:46","modified_gmt":"2020-09-23T14:18:46","slug":"die-zukunft-war-ein-ort","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.janinebeangallery.com\/en\/?page_id=11911","title":{"rendered":"exhibitions 2019 | Juan Miguel Pozo – \u201eDie Zukunft war eine Ort\u201c"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Juan Miguel Pozo<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201eDie Zukunft war ein Ort\u201c<\/p>\n\n\n\n

April 26th  \u2013 June 15st 2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

opening reception Thursday April 25th 5 \u2013 8pm<\/p>\n\n\n\n

during GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN we are open Friday April 26th 12(noon) – 9pm
Saturday, April 27th 11am – 8pm
Sunday, April 28th 11am – 7pm<\/p>\n\n\n\n

janinebeangallery CV Juan Miguel Pozo<\/a>Download<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n

When Juan Miguel Pozo came in 1994 from Havana to Europe, he had endured the so-called \u201eSpecial Period\u201c in Cuba before: A time of economic decline, owed partially to the breakup of trade with former Eastern bloc countries and bringing along an economy of scarcity right up to severe food shortages. Pozo was lucky at the time to have been  discovered as an artist on the streets of Havana by a German journalist and to have been recommended to friendly artists, who supported his entry to Europe which eventually led him to a grant at the academy of arts in D\u00fcsseldorf. Besides his development as an artist his emigration thus also had very concrete, existential reasons, or rather are these biographic circumstances and his oeuvre inevitably and visibly intertwined.
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Interestingly and despite the language barrier Pozo found in Berlin more connections to his own identity and past than in Barcelona, a preceding station of his migration to Europe. The Berlin legacies of socialist culture and aesthetics, for example in architecture, Russian movies or the eastern-oriented art, offered the possibility of connection to and examination of those social structures he just left behind. Juan Pozo describes his coming to Berlin \u201elike a moment of harmony with my past. The city was simultaneously new and known.\u201c To be able to have this reflection, the leaving of Cuba was of significance. There he found local social conventions and regulations as formative in everyday life, something he experienced as a kind of self-censorship. In this respect the change of the form of society was a mental liberation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the images of the exhibition \u201eDie Zukunft war ein Ort\u201c (\u201eThe Future Was A Place\u201c) not only places like Berlin and Havana are assembled but also the essences of utopia and dystopia. In front of monochrome, more or less abstract geometric basic shapes urban  architechtural objects float in the foreground, i.e. they lack ground or foundation, whole   pieces of land seem to be suspended in space like components of model kits. Though apparently the result of an urban building plan but without an identifiable purpose for inhabitants other urban elements like staircases appear non-attached in space. Through techniques like abrading and scraping all objects in the images seem worn and aged, in addition there are incomplete or abstract areas and runny colors on the fringes. The motifs thereby overall appear rough and marked by gradual decay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Juan Miguel Pozo\u2018s paintings connect everyday artificiality as a feature of dogmatized utopias with their inherent structural weaknesses and their result in disintegration and  collapse. For Pozo these experienced processes, respectively periods of time are one entity, the ideologic vision inheres its own demise as well as a social ruin bears the retention and gain of a cultural essence. Herein substantiates the title of the exhibition, because the future was a place, an idealized topos of the past, which is unable to stand the temporal dynamic of the actual present without disruption.
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text by Matthias Bergemann
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