Entanglements

About

Throughout more than twenty years, the work of Trinitarian cultural activator, theoretician and artist Christopher Cozier (Port of Spain, 1959) has explored the everyday forms of violence and social control exerted on the bodies. From the beginning, his work has refused to be encased into consensual politics of post-colonial Caribbean multicultural representation, introducing interferences and short circuits that make explicit the colonial oppressive forms that persist in the region. Cozier has given particular attention to symbols of power and their changing uses, considering how the experience of black bodies (bodies racialized by the imperial-colonial project) can reorient spatial knowledge, history, economy, migration, and language. In his work, race, class and gender collide to confront asymmetrical power relations that have constituted us from colonialism.

This exhibition in TEOR/éTica is the first individual show by Christopher Cozier in Costa Rica, the result of a consolidated artist grant, given annually to showcase work by representative contemporary artists in the region. Under the tittle Entanglements, the artist presents a fragment of his current research project, which focuses on the problems and paradoxes of the oil economies, as well as the link between forms of commercial expansionism and national, political and business interests on a global scale. The drawings and videos exhibited here are a continuation of two former exhibitions, entitled The Arrest, shown in Miami in 2013, and Gas Men, shown in 2014 at Françoise Heitsch gallery in Munich.

Miguel A. López

Christopher Cozier (Port of Spain, 1959) 

Is an artist and writer living and working in Trinidad. A 2013 Prince Claus Award laureate, he has participated in a number of contemporary art exhibitions in the Caribbean and internationally. Since 1989 he has published a range of essays in a number of catalogues and journals. He is one of the administrators of Alice Yard.