Catalogue > At random

“Key, washer, coin” is a video piece that combines techniques from the reenactment, animation, music, and other fields to ruminates towards language and capitalist exchange. The formal and semantic languages of advertisements are dissected, breaking the marketing model down to its component parts, highlighting the complex capitalist infrastructure that fuels our economic reality. Advertisement shorts, graphic design pieces, marketing texts are rarely mistaken for art. That is due to a congenital wound: those forms cannot cover up their commercial nature, the evident and immediate presence of the money. The invisible hand of these disciplines is the labor of scientists, formal semantic researchers, cryptographers and engineers. By learning from these disciplines is it possible to create an original flowchart of resources; simultaneously critical, persuasive and disillusioning outcomes/pieces are expected.

Alan Segal is a Buenos Aires-based artist whose work has been shown nationally and internationally. Segal’s video work has been presented at film festivals such as the New York Film Festival, Viennale, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin and, Mar del Plata International Film Festival. Among his recent group exhibitions are include Praising the surface at the Hesell Museum of Art (New York, USA), To push an ism at MAMBA (Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, Argentina), The Kitchen (New York, USA), A word is a shadow that falls on a lot of things at Ausstellungsraum Klingental (Basel, Switzerland), Desarticulaciones at Blau Projects (São Paulo, Brazil) and Variaciones sobre lo no mismo at MACBA (Buenos Aires Museum of Contemporary Art, Argentina). He also shows his work in international biennials; Visual Resonances at the BIENALSUR (the South America contemporary Art Biennial) and Draft Systems at The WRO Biennale (Wroclaw, Poland). As a film editor, Segal teamed up Gastón Solnicki for the films Kékszakállú (Argentina/Uruguay, 2016) and Introduzione all ‘Oscuro (Argentina/Austria, 2018). For his work in this film, he won the FIPRESCI award for the Best Editing at the Venice Film Festival. Segal studied at ENERC (Argentine National Film School), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (USA) and, UTDT Program for Artists (Argentina). He received his MFA from Bard College (USA).