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Eduardo Basualdo never ceases to shock his audiences with structures that totally immerse and sometimes overwhelm, consequently meaning that this show was one that was highly anticipated. Eduardo Basualdo’s large-scale installation exhibition ‘Shedding’ opened in Scrap Metal Gallery, Toronto, Canada on the 20th of February, only to be shut down a few weeks later due to the health crisis. However, typically enjoying testing his audience and his continual focus of theatrical space, relating the viewer’s bodies to their actions, their physical presence with his art, we were keen to interact.
Adrastus Collection: Fear is as real as the fiction built into your work, you even once said, "Fragility ... is a very attractive state to think and feel.” Your exhibition ‘Shedding’ could not come at a more fearful time, how do you think that would be engaged with by the public, during this current pandemic?
Eduardo Basualdo: I think the threat sharpens the senses. It is from that place that I am interested in mystery more than fear. I would like to be able to approach the state of alert with the work, pierce the social dimension that art consumption crosses and access intimacy. In relation to this moment we live, I think that it colors everything we see, it cannot be otherwise. We could relate anything we see to what is happening to us today. My last exhibition presented a moment of transformation, a universal change of skin, as if the sky had collapsed and we had to be reborn from the ashes. During the time it was open, each visitor associated the exhibition with the most immediate catastrophe they knew. But the association to a specific episode is anecdotal for me, no matter in what time or under what circumstances, the important thing in this project was to underline that inexorable passage of time that will turn us into ashes. This work indeed focuses on a collective catastrophe, but hundreds of them happen all the time at all times. They are part of our history and obviously of our future too. The exhibition offers a general look, dramatic but with distance. An astronomical view of humanity.
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