Beelzebub's Tales
Beelzebub’s Tales
*Artists:
Terry Berkowitz, Ryan Brown, Stefano Cagol, Jeannette Doyle, Alexis Duque, Shahram Entekhabi, Noël Hennelly, Humana y Generosa, Enrique Ježik, Mona Saeed Kamal, Kristin Bauer & Martin Durazo, Julia San Martin, Riiko Sakkinen, Benjamin Staker, Abdul Vas*
Proyectos Raúl Zamudio is pleased to present Beelzebub's Tales, an exhibition of international artists who work in painting, sculpture, works-on-paper, photography, and video. The title is a truncation of Greek-Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff’s, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson or An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man. This was the first volume of Gurdjieff’s trilogy titled All and Everything (1950), and whereas the other two volumes are more philosophical, the former is more literary as Gurdjieff’s ideas are woven into a science fiction story about a protagonist named Beelzebub who takes an interstellar voyage with his grandson. As he narrates to his progeny about the planet Earth and its inhabitants, Beelzebub alludes to Gurdjieff’s esotericism via his musings on what it is that makes humanity such an existential contradiction.
The individual works in the exhibition indirectly reflect Beelzebub’s observations, however reconfiguring them into altogether different contexts. Apart from diverse subject matter that the individual artists explore, a subtext of the exhibition considers the moment we find ourselves in our global contemporaneity at the end of 2020. In a year that has been marked by the deadly Covid-19 virus that has yet to abate resulting in more than a million and half deaths so far, the pandemic has upended not only our quotidian normality but made us question more than ever the society we live in and what that entails including the meaning and purpose of art. For as we venture into uncertainty into 2021, the artists and the exhibition too self-reflect as to what it is to be cultural producers and agents in a globality in which, in an ostensibly portent exclamation by Beelzebub himself, “Everything existing in the world “falls to the bottom.”
Opening 12/30/20, 6 pm-9pm
Exhibition Dates: 12/30/20-1/18/21
COVID 19: Space is limited and the event will be carried out in strict adherence to NY State COVID protocols.
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