Divinamente: Thirteen Artists from Colombia 4/15/2004 - 5/23/2004 Divinamente featured video, photography, and installation work by thirteen artists living and working in Colombia and who were exhibiting their work for the first time in the Bay Area. This exhibition, the second of the Contrabando series, was curated by Michèle Faguet, Director of Espacio La Rebeca, Bogota, Colombia.   C_Scape: Sites of Cultural (Ex)Change <2004> Digital Mural Project: María Elvira Escallón <2004> Divinamente: Thirteen Artists from Colombia <2004> Digital Mural Project: Sergio De La Torre <2004> Transmission Mission <2004> Urban Echoes: Wind, River, Trees, Clouds, Chickens, and Orange <2004> The Youth Rock Summer Laboratory <2004> Digital Mural Project: Youth & Public Media <2004> Paradigms Lost <2004> Digital Mural Project: San Francisco Print Collective <2004> 2 2 0 0 0 STATEMENT ARTIST LIST   Divinamente: Thirteen artists living and working in Colombia By Michèle Faguet This exhibition presents the work of thirteen artists from diverse economic, geographic, and educational backgrounds. In selecting these artists, I consciously strayed from the structures conventionally used to group artists together such as geography, subject matter, or similar artistic practices. Rather than attempt to represent something approximating a Colombian ‘scene,’ the selection reflects a context that can be characterized by its very lack of cohesion—a fragmented and atomized cultural environment in which individual producers work in relative isolation from one another. The lack of an obvious connective circuit between the artists should not be considered problematic or disadvantageous; on the contrary, hopefully, it will encourage a more nuanced and layered reading of individual works. This diversity also undercuts the insistence of assigning a dominant tendency to the work so that it might eventually be presented and packaged for international consumption. If there is one element that might link these individuals together, perhaps it is the close tie that exists between their diverse artistic practices and their everyday lives. This of course might be said of any artist, but here we are dealing with a situation in which the absence of an art market and the scarcity of functional institutions or non-institutional spaces makes it very difficult to even think about artmaking in professional terms. And so the activity of producing work becomes less dependent upon its eventual exhibitive or commercial value and more clearly tied to those quotidian routines that define who we are as individuals above and beyond our vocational calling. In this way the importance of day to day life is preserved. Participating Artists: Wendy Anzola, Sylvie Boutiq, José Tomas Giraldo, Simon Hernández, Humberto Junca, Alejandro Mancera, Juan Mejía, Ana María Millán, Yomayra Puentes, Catalina Rodriguez, Gabriel Sierra, Giovanni Vargas, and Rolando Vargas. Michèle Faguet is the Director of Espacio La Rebeca in Bogotá, Colombia. She came to San Francisco as a visiting lecturer in the Curatorial Practice Program at California College of the Arts. This was made possible by a generous grant from the Christensen Fund.