Alejandro Cesarco

The SFU School for the Contemporary Arts is pleased to welcome Alejandro Cesarco as the SCA’s 2020 Spring Audain Visual Artist in Residence.


Through different formats and strategies, his expanded practice—which includes producing artwork, publishing books, and curating exhibitions—reflects his recurrent interests in repetition, narrative, and the practices of reading and translating. Drawing from the legacies and genealogies of conceptual art, Cesarco finds moments of affect to explore “the way meaning is felt.” His recently completed doctoral dissertation, “Under the Sign of Regret,” which reads artistic forms through the lens of regret, positions regret as an aesthetic mode and methodological tool with which to address the relationships between imagery, language, and meaning.


During his time in Vancouver, Cesarco will present a free public lecture on his work. In conjunction with SCA faculty member Kathy Slade, Cesarco will also work closely with third-year visual art students towards conceptualizing and creating work for the BFA Project, an annual student exhibition in the Audain Gallery. Recursion, this year’s BFA Project, explores the relationship between contemporary artistic practices and histories of artistic influence. The work presented in Recursion takes up notions of originality, the use of references, and practices of translation and citation. The exhibition includes painting, sculpture, photography, video, drawing, textiles, and a collaborative artist book edited by Cesarco and Slade. Entitled With Thanks, the book is composed of letters that directly address a significant influence that has prompted or guided each of the exhibiting artists’ practices.


Alejandro Cesarco was born in Montevideo, Uruguay and currently lives in New York. His most recent solo exhibitions include: A Solo Exhibition, Witte de With, Rotterdam, (2019); These Days, Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin, (2019); Tactics & Technics, CAC, Vilnius (2019); Song, The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2017); The Measure of Memory, Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan (2017); Public Process, Sculpture Center, New York (2017); Prescribe the Symptom, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2015); Loyalties and Betrayals, Murray Guy, New York (2015); Secondary Revision, Frac Île-de-France/Le Plateau, Paris (2013); A Portrait, a Story, and an Ending, Kunsthalle Zürich (2013); Alejandro Cesarco, mumok, Vienna (2012); A Common Ground, Uruguayan Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennial (2011); One without the Other, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City (2011); and Present Memory, Tate Modern, London (2010). His recent group exhibitions include: Question the Wall Itself, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2016); Under the Same Sun, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014); Tell It to My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2013); and The Imminence of Poetics, 30th Bienal de São Paulo (2012).

Cesarco has curated exhibitions in the U.S., Uruguay, Argentina, and most recently, sections of the 33 Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2018) and ARCO, Madrid (2020). He is director of the non-profit arts organization, Art Resources Transfer.

Presented by the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU in collaboration with SFU Galleries.

EVENTS

Artist Talk

March 12, 6:00 PM

Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema

BFA Project 2020: Recursion

March 26 – April 4, 2020

Please check back HERE for information about RECURSION, which is being reconfigured in response to COVID-19. All public events, including the gallery exhibition, are cancelled.

Simon Fraser University

Goldcorp Centre for the Arts

149 West Hastings Street

Vancouver BC