Scuola Grande della Misericordia, Venice
September 2022
Video by Tim Bowditch courtesy the artist. Copyright Oscar Murillo.
September 17–November 27, 2023
Oscar Murillo presents a large-scale installation in the historic setting of the Scuola Grande della Misericordia in Venice, including new paintings and an extensive, interactive presentation of Frequencies, his long-term collaborative project with schoolchildren across the world.
Frequencies is an ongoing global art project conceived by Oscar Murillo in 2013. The artist and his collaborators visit schools worldwide, fixing raw canvas to classroom desks with the sole requirement that they remain there for 6 months, inviting students aged 10-16 to freely mark, draw, scribble or write on them. Frequencies has grown to become a vast global project involving more than 450 schools in over 30 countries. To date, over 100,000 school children have contributed to the project.
The project has brought together a huge, multi-layered volume of material over almost a decade from locations across the world. Murillo has been working in recent years to develop new ways to open up this archive internationally and to create new opportunities for its rich content to be experienced. A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise is the first opportunity for the wider public to experience some of these new interventions first-hand.
New work by Murillo is exhibited for the first time, including a 9-metre-wide gestural painting, inspired by Monet’s Water Lilies. Also on view are large-scale works from his Disrupted Frequencies series featuring multiple Frequencies canvases stitched together. A new sound piece by Murillo plays throughout the exhibition. Made up of layered recordings from different locations such as school playgrounds, basketball courts, traffic roundabouts and vegetable gardens, the generative soundscape moves through the space and responds to live data tracking the take-off, landing and flight paths of planes on global routes chosen by Murillo.
Inside an enclosed area at the center of the exhibition, visitors can discover Arepas y Tamales, Murillo’s recent collection of wearable sculptures. Motifs and drawings by Murillo have been digitally transformed onto virtual garments which visitors can ‘try on’ and move around in, as video projections flood the walls and react to movement within the space. Works from Murillo’s Flight Drawings series, made on planes during international air travel, are also on display.
An arena space with tiered seating hosts a wide-ranging public programme of events curated by SAVVY Contemporary to accompany the exhibition. Inspired by the global nature of Murillo’s Frequencies project, the programme will feature dance, music, poetry and talks by artists from around the world. Music by composer and musician Tanka Fonta, performances by Ekow Alabi & the Drummers of Joy, poetry readings by writer and performer Frank Báez, a performance by Danish-Kenyan dancer and choreographer Phyllis Akinyi, and a folkloric mashup from from a group of 14 singers and musicians from the Valle del Cauca region of Colombia will take place throughout the opening day.
To mark the end of his large-scale exhibition Murillo will stage a fashion show in the historic space featuring 100 of his Arepas y Tamales wearable sculptures alongside newly commissioned pieces by fashion students from Paris, Milan, Florence and Venice.
Oscar Murillo said: “This runway marks the beginning of something very exciting that I have been developing in my practice. Arepas y Tamales is a platform which symbolises an ambition towards cultural redistribution. It reflects the importance of the global research and collaboration that has taken place through my project, Frequencies, for over a decade. Now I am planting a seed with the potential of Arepas y Tamales to further transform Frequencies into something that can infiltrate back into youth cultures in locations around the world.” The show will be followed by an afterparty featuring a live performance by Angolan-Portuguese singer-songwriter Pongo, and a DJ set by multidisciplinary artist Manuka Honey.
Learn more at A Storm is Blowing From Paradise.