# Margarita Paksa

Margarita Paksa Biography:
Born in Buenos Aires, she divides her time between this city and Canada. She is senior Sculpture professor and works as an artist in a broad variety of media, changing back and forth with ease between sculpture and painting, drawing, engraving, industrial design, objects, installations, multimedia art, video and writing throughout her work. She has been participating actively in multimedia visual art since 1964, when she joined the lnstituto Di Tella. She was one of the founders of conceptual art and political art in Argentina during the 60`s and has produced numerous videos. She achieved international recognition in 2006 in La scoperta del corpo elettronico. Arte e video negli anni 70, in Turin, Italy, for Tiempo de descuento from 1978, considered to be the first video art in Argentina. In a teaching capacity, she has had a great influence as the Multimedia chair in graduate and postgraduate courses at the lnstituto Universitario
Nacional del Arte (IUNA).
As a researcher at the Conicet, she has directed several investigations into "art in the public arena" and "net.art". In 2004, the Fundación Espigas edited her book Proyectos sobre el discurso de mi in two languages, about the projects presented at the lnstituto Di Tella during the 60`s. That same year, she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Scholarship to further develop her research.
She has given conferences and seminars at different congresses and roundtables in this country and abroad, such as those held at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, the Facultad de
Bellas Artes de La Plata and the Facultad de San Carlos, in Valencia, Spain. She has also exhibited and given courses in Canada, including at the Art Faculty of Ottawa, New Brunswick and Concordia
in Montreal.
Paksa has published numerous essays, in particular a study of the Rorschach plates, as well as on
Marcel Duchamp and Macedonio Fernández. She has been writing texts on art and technology since
1996, a subject which she has developed extensively throughout her multimedia artistic output. She has also taken part as a member of the jury to select teaching staff in some of the leading art faculties in Argentina, such as Tucumán, Córdoba and Rosario. She was also curator at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, for Ejercicios de Ricardo Carreira.
Her works are owned by major museums and private national and international collections. Her most recent distinctions include the Primer Premio de Pintura from the Fundación Fortabat, Premio Multimedia from the Faena Art District, the Guggenheim Scholarship in 2004 and the Installation Prize at the Fifth International Art Biennale in Cairo, Egypt, 1994. Currently, Paksa is carrying out international work with the Henrique Faria Fine Art Gallery at exhibitions such as Volta 5, ArteBA, Pinta New York, ARCO Madrid and Art Brussels, in 2009, and in 2010, Pinta London, New conceptulisms, and the recent show in New York, which received rave reviews from the critics. In 2011 she will be present at ARCO Madrid with a solo project.
She is now writing a book on minimalism to be edited by the Museo de Bellas Artes Neuquén and an anthology of her work to be launched at the retrospective exhibition dedicated to her by the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires: Margarita Paksa.
Awards:
"Guggenheim Scholar Ship"; "Faena Art District" Multimedia Award; Salón Nacional Nuevos Soportes, First Prize and Second Prize at the same place the year before. She took up three months residence in "Banff Centre for the Arts", Alberta Canada; where she has just put her work: " El Partido de Tenis", on-line. "Installations" (Hollographics and Neon) In "The 5th. International Biennial El Cairo. "Fortabat`s Found" First Prize in Painting, among others.
Her work`s not only owned by many Museums such as: "The MALBA", MANba, "Bellas Artes" Museum, "Sivori" Museum, "MACRO" Museum in Rosario, and "MAC" in Posadas, Misiones, but also by a number of private collectors such as: "The Citibank", and "The Velox Bank", Fotabat`s Found. Ruth Benzacar, Mauro Herlitzka and the Bronx Museum, in New York; Owens Gallery; Argentinian Embassy, in Ottawa; A Space Gallery, in Toronto; Gaby Warrens collections; Miguel Jantus; Dwight Fulford, in Canada; Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and Achuel Moreno.
Individual Showings:
2007: "ULTRA REAL" Video Installation Analogical – Digital, FAENA Theatre; "ULTRA REAL" in ARTEBA; "500 WATTS 4.636 KC. 4,5 C" Epson Lounge Recoleta Cultural Centre.
2005: "El Partido de Tenis", Cultural Centre of Rio Gallegos.
2004: "PROYECTOS", Contemporary Art Museum, Posadas Misiones.
2003: "Estrategias para la Apropiación. Four Projects displayed in Bellas Artes University, San Carlos Valencia.
"Proyecto en ejecución", Museu de'Art Moderna, Tarragona County Council, Spain.
1999: "Impresiones Digitales" Ruth Benzacar Gallery.
1998: "Tenis", Tha Banff Centre, Canada.
1997: "El Partido de Tenis", Digital Video Installation, Modern Art Museum
"Cuatro Instalaciones", Del Barro Museum, Asunción, Paraguay; Oboro Gallery, Montreal, Canada.
Group Showings:
2004: "The Digital Arch", Federico Klemm Gallery.
2002: Puente - Paksa - Orensanz, Ruth Benzacar Gallery; National Bank Award; "XCI National Lounge, Palais de Glace; Politics and Art in the 60`s.
2000: Prodaltec Award; Constantini Award, Electronic Art, Bahia Blanca.
1999: Fortabat Award, II Mercosur`s Art Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil; "Traslocal Poll" Ipso Facto Gallery, Nantes, France; The Stanley Piker Gallery, Kingston, England.
Installations
In a commentary made in 1989, in the catalogue from one of her exhibitions, Margarita Paksa admits the possibility that an artist's work will essentially always tell the same story. The narrative thread, she says, is expressed not as a linear sequence of events, but as a perplexing circular succession.
I believe that the evolution of her own work is a good example of this recurrent trend, the obsessive stalking of an obscure yet perpetually remote question. When this question is about the issue of temporality, the circle has to turn on itself yet again to search in vain, closing the circle to cover the unsalvageable distance between its two extremes.
The two installations presented by Margarita Paksa in this exhibition are about this obsession with the dragon biting its own tail, according to her own description of the figure mentioned above. An obsession with time, which, disfigured by the refraction of the symbol, inevitably unfolds beyond itself, producing gaps and confusions. An obsession with the mechanism of the reflection produced by these disengagements, a reflection in turn responsible for the radical confrontation between what is real and what is merely named. An obsession with the meaning of art, of the myth and rite which always try to explain what follows on from death, or attempt to reveal the depths of man's final rest.
El arte ha muerto, viva el arte-art is dead, long live art-is the title the artist gives to her first proposal. Perhaps she is alluding to the good health enjoyed by so many dead executed by the illusion of time; a mention of the new king who succeeds the dead one (who is perhaps always the same) or a reference to that old threat uttered by Hegel to the horror and delight of entire generations. On the basis of this proposal, the artist attempts to close the circle by speeding it along its path, leaping forward in order to look back at it from the other bank. To be present at one's own funeral rites can only happen in dream and myth. Or in art, charged with endowing the impossible with an image.
To play out the rite, and simultaneously be present at its enaction, the actors must divide themselves and plunge into an alternative time frame. But this operation creates the ultimate schism, leaving things on one side and images on the other. This is why the scene is always set in the lintel of the cave and names the objects even as it identifies their shadows. Mi cuerpo deseó su sombra (My body desired its shadow), says the poem through which the artist converses with Big Jim (God). Immediately, the text suggests a stratagem to meet that desire and consummate the cycle, to reestablish the mathematical harmony of the circle. To access La hora cero, either a countdown must be started or time must be frozen. But this task is futile, for the gaze needs distance just as memory needs absence and desire seeks to replace a lack of something. Form can only take shape against a backdrop of what is withheld.
The second installation presented by Margarita Paksa is called El descanso de Loreta - Metamorfosis. The elements she uses are different, as is the layout and the montage itself. But her obsession with the relationship between reality, image and symbol remains, as does her concern with the recurrence of time and its parallel passage: the perplexing evolution of the succession of events taking place on the other side of the scenario, beyond the final frontiers.
Dreams are the only memory of that time in its transgression. Informatics is the memory of ordered time. The artist brings these rival perspectives into play and inverts their sense of direction through perverted mirror games, so that dreams are recorded and repeated and projected a thousand times, while the image of the computer and the video becomes troubled by the nebulous reasoning of desire, by the intricate time weave of dreams.
It is indeed true, the story told is always the same one, the attempt to derogate death and decipher dreams. The chance to distort the logical sequence of time, discovering its folds and shortcuts to meander tortuously back on itself, finding false walls and bottoms in a convoluted flow leading to multiple directions. But, in the end, time is neither linear nor circular. Perhaps it is just a device which measures the waiting for an impossible moment, the one which marks the execution of art, everlastingly stayed at the last instant. Perhaps it is simply the name of that pointless gap lying between one dream and the next.