Gladys Nistor.

INSTITUTO DE COOPERACION IBEROAMERICANA

As it happens, exile, that trope so precious to Modernity, tends to be something more than mere exposure to a foreign culture. For the exiled subject there is a moment when his strange environment finally becomes familiar, and his own self suddenly becomes unfamiliar. He discovers himself to be a part of the new culture, infinitely close to a daily process of becoming but something separate from his own memories - from what used to be his way of thinking, his way of experiencing emotion. He has incorporated that critical sense of distance that defines his interaction with his environment, and he has become the living embodiment of that remoteness. Perhaps exile - like a somewhat perverse laboratory - merely accentuates that condition of strangeness that constitutes all of us.

Gladys Nistor, like many of her generation who have emigrated from Argentina, has lived far away from her place of birth for some time, both by choice and as a response to the unfavorable conditions for cultural production that exist in her native country. Her work, which has in the past often been marked by drastic changes, was even more radically modified by her emigration: it became increasingly austere, precise, and cruel. Her pieces in this show made no concessions to narrative, but were reduced to a minimal sculptural vocabulary, which one could almost call "secretive."

Combining two bodies of work, this exhibition marked a temporary return to Buenos Aires, as it was Nistor's first solo show in this city. None of the pieces that were shown here were given rifles; for convenience the artist refers to them as "windows" and "mirrors." The "windows" are small, circular perforations in the wall of the gallery, with the holes separated from the exterior by glass lenses, also circular, which are fastened to the wall with nails in configurations roughly following their outlines. The "mirrors" were even stranger: like blackened flying saucers, they were fastened to the walls, bent toward the floor. The two groups of work maintained a curiously parasitic relationship to the wall, rather than a literal one; the pieces inhabit an intermediary state, "suspended" in every sense of the word. The viewer was forced to approach the works in order to perceive them clearly - the "mirrors," each consisting of two circular pieces of reflecting glass placed face-to-face, were only revealed to be such after close examination. This movement toward the pieces suggested the engagement of the viewer's body, but the careful observation of these pieces excludes the body. The viewer, like the wall, both gained and lost the solidity of a fixed place, as he or she, too, began to fluctuate in the indeterminate.

The "windows" could be compared to eardrums. If I may allow myself this animism, we could imagine that they listen to what they force us to consider - the fragility of limits and, ultimately, our own fragility, of which they are nothing more than ephemeral embodiments. The "mirrors," which tirelessly gaze at one another, reflect nothing but the obsessive neutrality of that blind stare. Nistor has carried out some extremely subtle interventions in many of these pieces, for example by placing small ceramic bricks along their edges, thus shaping fantastic, Piranesian architectures out of repetition and emptiness.

These architectures embody that fragility, that simple but cruel state of suspension that makes me think of exile. I attempt to look at myself in Nistor's mirrors, as I attempt to look at myself in myself, without seeing anything but the deceitful effects of a banal, mysterious mechanism, untouched and untouchable. More than illustrating something about exile, these pieces place it in our thoughts; they offer themselves as something that cannot ultimately be apprehended - in order to remind us that we are no less evanescent than these reflections of neutrality.

- Carlos Basualdo