43 Missing Mexican Students Exhibition in Vallarta Oficina de Proyectos Culturales
October 11, 2015

Oficina de Proyectos Culturales in Puerto Vallarta is proud to present an exhibition of contemporary art focused on the significance of the disappearance of the 43 students from the Normal Rural School, Raúl Isidro Burgos in Ayotzinapa, a case that has yet to be solved. Opening on the one year anniversary of the events, this exhibition recognizes the 43 students and questions the official narrative of their disappearance through mixed-media art including posters, kites, video, and an interactive art installation.
 
In January of 2015, Oaxaca’s internationally renown artist Francisco Toledo called for submissions for Posters for Ayotzinapa, resulting in nearly 700 entries from around the world. Artists from Argentina to Greece; Iran to Lebanon; and Poland to the USA responded to his call, recognizing that the tragedy of Ayotzinapa had outraged people beyond the borders of Mexico.

The artworks included in "Posters for Ayotzinapa" are the result of the plural and ambitious call launched by Toledo and the Institute of Graphic Arts of Oaxaca just months after the event that led to the disappearance of the 43 students. Committed to the social struggle and denunciation of the event, as well as with aesthetics, Posters for Ayotzinapa clearly illustrates the tremendous potential of posters as an agent provocateur of reaction, opinion, and reflection.
 
Also included in the exhibition is an installation by Toledo of 43 kites (above) with the faces of the students of the Normal Rural School, that the artist made with the participants of the "Art and Paper" workshop of San Agustin Etla, in Oaxaca.
 
Toledo explained that his idea of the kites came from an old tradition practiced in Juchitan, Oaxaca. People there use kites to attract the souls of people who have died. For the artist, however, this does not mean that the students are already dead, rather it is a way to call them home to their families.
 
Level of Confidence by Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is an art project to commemorate the mass kidnapping of the 43 students. The project consists of a face-recognition camera that has been trained to tirelessly look for the faces of the disappeared students. As you stand in front of the camera, the system uses algorithms to find which student's facial features look most like yours and gives a "level of confidence" on how accurate the match is, in percentages.
 
"It is unlikely that the piece will find the students because the face recognition system is trained with the few pictures that are publicly available, ergo, photos of their identification cards, which are additionally low resolution and a couple of years old in many cases, also the piece can only be exposed in certain places, such as universities and museums, where it is unlikely that students are. But the spirit of this project is to continue the search," explains the artist, whose work is part of collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern collection in London, in an interview.
 
Guerrero: Monster in the mountains is a 7-minute short documentary based on the work of photographer Matt Black, produced and published in the series of videos and films for the New Yorker magazine. This short film shows how families of the missing are coping with the still unexplained loss of their loved ones, and how citizens are struggling to protect themselves, and to preserve hope.
 
Black is a photographer from California’s Central Valley. His work has explored themes of migration, poverty and the environment in his native rural California and in southern Mexico.
 
A series of roundtable discussions, poetry reading, and talks with the artists  wil be held throughout the exhibition.
 
Oficina de Proyectos Culturales (Office for Cultural Projects - OPC) is an independent non-profit arts organization dedicated to fostering dialogue through exhibitions, round table discussions, public art and arts education programs. OPC works with artists, architects, curators, academics, and writers who explore ideas that shape our city and to develop cultural programming that is firmly rooted in Puerto Vallarta, yet international in scope.
 
OPC wishes to thank the Barlow Family for their generous donation for the use of the building, also Master Francisco Toledo; Inari Reséndiz; Laurena Toledo; the Institute of Graphic Arts of Oaxaca; the National Institute of Anthropology and History; Matt Black; and Rafael Lozano Hemmer.
 
Oficina de Proyectos Culturales in Puerto Vallarta is proud to present an exhibition of contemporary art focused on the significance of the disappearance of the 43 students from the Normal Rural School, Raúl Isidro Burgos in Ayotzinapa, a case that has yet to be solved. Opening on the one year anniversary of the events, this exhibition recognizes the 43 students and questions the official narrative of their disappearance through mixed-media art including posters, kites, video, and an interactive art installation.
 
In January of 2015, Oaxaca’s internationally renown artist Francisco Toledo called for submissions for Posters for Ayotzinapa, resulting in nearly 700 entries from around the world. Artists from Argentina to Greece; Iran to Lebanon; and Poland to the USA responded to his call, recognizing that the tragedy of Ayotzinapa had outraged people beyond the borders of Mexico.

The artworks included in "Posters for Ayotzinapa" are the result of the plural and ambitious call launched by Toledo and the Institute of Graphic Arts of Oaxaca just months after the event that led to the disappearance of the 43 students. Committed to the social struggle and denunciation of the event, as well as with aesthetics, Posters for Ayotzinapa clearly illustrates the tremendous potential of posters as an agent provocateur of reaction, opinion, and reflection.
 
Also included in the exhibition is an installation by Toledo of 43 kites (above) with the faces of the students of the Normal Rural School, that the artist made with the participants of the "Art and Paper" workshop of San Agustin Etla, in Oaxaca.
 
Toledo explained that his idea of the kites came from an old tradition practiced in Juchitan, Oaxaca. People there use kites to attract the souls of people who have died. For the artist, however, this does not mean that the students are already dead, rather it is a way to call them home to their families.
 
Level of Confidence by Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is an art project to commemorate the mass kidnapping of the 43 students. The project consists of a face-recognition camera that has been trained to tirelessly look for the faces of the disappeared students. As you stand in front of the camera, the system uses algorithms to find which student's facial features look most like yours and gives a "level of confidence" on how accurate the match is, in percentages.
 
"It is unlikely that the piece will find the students because the face recognition system is trained with the few pictures that are publicly available, ergo, photos of their identification cards, which are additionally low resolution and a couple of years old in many cases, also the piece can only be exposed in certain places, such as universities and museums, where it is unlikely that students are. But the spirit of this project is to continue the search," explains the artist, whose work is part of collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern collection in London, in an interview.
 
Guerrero: Monster in the mountains is a 7-minute short documentary based on the work of photographer Matt Black, produced and published in the series of videos and films for the New Yorker magazine. This short film shows how families of the missing are coping with the still unexplained loss of their loved ones, and how citizens are struggling to protect themselves, and to preserve hope.
 
Black is a photographer from California’s Central Valley. His work has explored themes of migration, poverty and the environment in his native rural California and in southern Mexico.
 
A series of roundtable discussions, poetry reading, and talks with the artists  wil be held throughout the exhibition.
 
Oficina de Proyectos Culturales (Office for Cultural Projects - OPC) is an independent non-profit arts organization dedicated to fostering dialogue through exhibitions, round table discussions, public art and arts education programs. OPC works with artists, architects, curators, academics, and writers who explore ideas that shape our city and to develop cultural programming that is firmly rooted in Puerto Vallarta, yet international in scope.
 
OPC wishes to thank the Barlow Family for their generous donation for the use of the building, also Master Francisco Toledo; Inari Reséndiz; Laurena Toledo; the Institute of Graphic Arts of Oaxaca; the National Institute of Anthropology and History; Matt Black; and Rafael Lozano Hemmer.
 
Francisco Toledo  (born 1940) Juchitán, Oaxaca, Mexico and resides in Oaxaca, Mexico. He studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Oaxaca and the Centro Superior de Artes Aplicadas del Instituto de Bellas Artes, Mexico. In 1960 he moved to Paris from where he travelled through Europe. In 1965 when he returned to Mexico he started to promote and protect the arts and crafts in Oaxaca.
 
For more than twenty years Toledo has been concerned with the well-being of the Oaxacan community and has devoted much of his wealth to this purpose. He is an untiring promoter, sponsor and disseminator of the cultural values of his native state, turning its main town into a dynamic centre for the visual arts and literature. He has created children's libraries and founded a number of important artistic and cultural institutions: the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Oaxaca, the Graphic Arts Institute of Oaxaca (which holds some 100,000 books on art and architecture), the Jorge Luis Borges Library for the Blind (which Toledo created after watching a group of blind people visit a nearby art museum), the Centro Fotografico Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Ediciones Toledo (a printing house, which most recently published translations of the poets John Ashbery and Seamus Heaney), and the Centro Cultural Santo Domingo (botanical garden, art restoration centre and library).

In 1993 Toledo was instrumental in founding Pro-OAX (the Endorsement for the Defense and Conservation of the Cultural and National Heritage of Oaxaca) dedicated to the protection and promotion of art, culture and the built and natural environment of Oaxaca. Through this activism Oaxaca has been transformed into one of Mexico's major cultural, artistic and political hubs.

In 2005 he received a Right Livelihood Award for devoting himself and his art to the protection and enhancement of the heritage, environment and community life of his native Oaxaca.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967. In 1989 he received a B.Sc. in Physical Chemistry from Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. He is a faculty associate of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.

Electronic artist, develops interactive installations that are at the intersection of architecture and performance art. His main interest is in creating platforms for public participation, by perverting technologies such as robotics, computerized surveillance or telematic networks. Inspired by phantasmagoria, carnival and animatronics, his light and shadow works are "antimonuments for alien agency".

Recently the subject of solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, he was the first artist to officially represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition at Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel in 2007. He has also shown at Art Biennials and Triennials in Havana, Istanbul, Kochi, Liverpool, Montréal, Moscow, New Orleans, Seville, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore and Sydney.
 
Matt Black is from California’s Central Valley, an agricultural region in the heart of the state. His work has explored the connections between migration, poverty, farming, and the environment in his native rural California and in southern Mexico for two decades.

His work has been honored by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation, the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Pictures of the Year International, World Press Photo, the Alexia Foundation, the Center for Cultural Innovation, and others.

Oficina de Proyectos Culturales (Office for Cultural Projects - OPC) is located in downtown Puerto Vallarta at 598 Juárez (corner of Aldama) and the exhibition will be open until November 14, 2015. Hours on Wednesday thru Friday are from 11:00 am until 2:00 pm and 5:00 until 8:00 pm. Saturday hours are 10:00 am until 2:00 pm.