Andrés Felipe Uribe Cárdenas

Artist biography

Andrés Felipe Uribe Cárdenas, 1982, bogotá, colombia. lives, loves and works in berlin, germany. bachelor in fine arts from ujtl, bogotá, 2007. performance lessons with la pocha nostra, az, usa, 2013. diplom and meisterschüler from khb, Berlin, 2020, 2021. borderline crossover artist and underground more or less conceptual erotic poet. sometimes publishes cheap .pdfs compilations and tries to sell them via paypal. has turned off more than a hundred television screens inside public spaces from 2012-on going. solo exhibitions in los angeles, cali, bogotá and berlin. some collective shows in oslo, paris, buenos aires, new york, washington, madrid. collections in colombia, chile, costa rica, usa and germany.

Project description

These videos show some exercises in the public space which engage directly to it and create some tensions as they took place in critical moments of our present. Since I arrived to berlin some months before the covid pandemic, my whole experience was limited and affected by heavy social and psychological tensions as you may
imagine. these may be labeled as part of a borderline exploration of boundaries and limits. They step into the social and the political using simple gestures. Sometimes they trigger real controversial discussions. I feel those discussions are particularly real discussions around contemporary art because they do not take place inside institutional context of overeducated specialized people, like we, or most of the art world people are. Those randomly provoqued situations reveal art as a difficult dialogue.

One sadly controversial piece is Kunst ist Keine Ausrede. The name is an expression the policeman used when they addressed me inside a cemetery, one winter, also during the pandemic. I was collecting Blumenvasen because I wanted to make an investigation of that object for some reason, I think they are interesting and also poetical, anyway, one visitor of the place called the police and they made me an Anzeige. I recorded the conversation with the policemen (as I have a collection of those already) I was very nervous because I didn ́t want problems with the law, but I also was confident it was a misunderstanding. So I answered to the police with a letter asking for an apology, explaining the situation as it wasn ́t intended to be an offense. Weeks later they dropped the charges. In my condition of a non-EU foreigner this type of actions are more than complicated. And they mean a total risk of my immigrationstatus. I'm conscious about it the more time I spend in this country. Anyway I think doing art implies taking some risks, and I like to address some problems which aren ́t directly reserved for the aesthetical sphere only.

The exhibition of this fragile documentation means a brutal sincerity of showing not just artistic virtuosity or highly aesthetical products. On contrast, it presents basically mistakes, misunderstandings, errors and (bordering crime and punishment) failures, that come from a difficult and confrontational definition of the artistic exercise.