Gallery Tour: Mario García Torres

Mexico-based artist Mario García Torres uses video, photography, and sound to explore the boundaries between memory and truth, reality and fiction, linking back to the history of Conceptual Art. Here, interviewed by curator Aram Moshayedi, he discusses his first US survey show at the Walker Art Center (closing February 17), featuring 45 works created over the past two decades, as well as a new augmented reality installation titled Illusion Brought Me Here.

In reprising a 2005 film work—in which actors pantomime scenes from Kim Jong-il's favorite Hollywood movies—Mario García Torres decided to do the same thing with films beloved by the late dictator's son, with one twist: this 2018 edition would include a made-up list of Kim Jong-un's top films. Dylan Redford, the producer of García Torres's new Walker-commissioned film, considers this choice, examining the role of arbitrariness, spectacle, and absurdity in dictatorial tactics.

In May 2018, Mario García Torres invited 14 friends to a beach house in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, for an unspecified reason. Fueled by sun, surf, and mescal, the group learned that their task was to be photographed, the captured images to be transformed into 3D holograms to populate the augmented reality app accompanying Mario García Torres: Illusion Brought Me Here. Among them was Eduardo Donjuan, a screenwriter, producer, and sometimes comedian, who shares his diary of his days in Puerto Escondido.

"Imagine for a moment this is not an exhibition and these are not works of art," writes Mario García Torres of his Walker solo exhibition, "but rather objects that appear, randomly, out of negotiations between interests and desires," Curator Vincenzo de Bellis reflects on Illusion Brought Me Here and the negotiations and collaborations that brought it into reality.