Over the past two decades, Peruvian artist Ishmael Randall Weeks has created works that reflect on public space, the current environmental crisis, and the construction of shared narratives. His particular focus is Peru, where there is a constant friction between superimposed historical times and the present, as its pre-Hispanic past is constantly revisited from a contemporary perspective. Using drawing, sculpture, video, and installation, Randall Weeks deploys a research methodology that allows him to approach the particularities of cities through an emphasis on architecture and the modes of constructing, inhabiting, and creating memory, and to highlight the tension between transformation and permanence. Curated by Miguel A. López, the exhibition “Metalizamos nuestras memorias” (We Metallized Our Memories), brought together some fifty medium- and large-format works created by Randall Weeks between 2006 and 2023.
Ordinary materials such as concrete, stone, rubber, brick, and metal are recurrent in these works, but they are used in ways that are anything but everyday: Boxes for transporting fruit are made of mirrors; gym equipment is built out of bricks. Things and their use are in contradiction, as are mobility and permanence. Necesito alas para volar, lápiz y piedra para estudiar y flores para nuestra muerte (I Need Wings to Fly, Pencil and Stone to Study, and Flowers for Our Death), 2016, for instance, is composed of three cement sculptures that mimic oversize paper airplanes. Placed on metal tripods that emphasize the weight and magnitude of the massive structures, the works suggest different directions for an impossible flight, projected toward an unreachable movement. Nómade I, 2006, is a sculpture based on a three-wheeled cargo bike—a mode of transportation with a crucial role in the exchange of materials, waste, or merchandise throughout a city such as Lima—and a transportable house built with recycled metal containers, a prototype for low-cost housing.
The exhibition’s final room featured, alongside more recent works, Balances/Tensiones, 2006/2008, which was first shown in one of the artist’s early solo exhibitions, held in this very room in 2006. This sculpture, also based on the three-wheeled cargo bike, uses the structure as a base for metal stands from which hang stones from the Vilcanota River in the Cusco region. On the other side of this last room was Metalizamos nuestras memorias, 2016—the work that lent its title to the exhibition—in which bits of industrial debris such as metal rods, pipes, nuts, and bolts, all found near huacas(ancient burial sites) in the city of Lima, have been copper plated to preserve them like precious memories. Thus, the exhibition concluded by suggesting the possibility that intervening in the materiality of things—the essence of Randall Weeks’s art—can be a way of altering their temporality. Making permanent the objects with which we coexist allows us to see them from other viewpoints and understand their impact on human interactions and on our ways of inhabiting the world.
Translated from Spanish by Michele Faguet.
