Past EXHIBITION
Looking Back Moving Forward
Nov 23, 2024—Apr 27, 2025
Durban Segnini Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Looking Back Moving Forward, curated by Rina Carvajal. Looking Back Moving Forward presents a selection of work by six contemporary Venezuelan artists - Alexander Apóstol, Alessandro BalteoYazbeck, Mariana Bunimov, Luis Molina-Pantin, Javier Téllez and ChristianVinck - whose work provides a unique reflection on the socio-political and cultural situation of Venezuela, tracing an active dialogue between past and present, proximity and distance, rootedness and displacement, personal and collective memory.
As part of the current-day Venezuelan diaspora, the artists in Looking Back Moving Forward live and work independently in different parts of the world, but all use their practices to capture the profound sense of loss and transformation experienced by their generation. Alexander Apóstol and Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck interrogate the fractures within Venezuela’s modernity, critically highlighting the stark contrasts between the developmentalist state policies and the lived realities of marginalization. They also reveal the inherent contradictions within kinetic artistic languages and the absorption and instrumentalization of those languages by national agendas. In a similarly reflective manner, Javier Téllez outspokenly unveils, in an almost premonitory way, the class struggles and socio-economic decay that would come to define Venezuela over subsequent decades. Luis Molina-Pantin turns his focus toward the country’s gradual economic collapse following the banking crisis of the late 1990s, while Mariana Bunimov and Christian Vinck reflect on personal and collective memories of migration, displacement, and the emotional and psychological effects of the diasporic experience.
Selected Artworks
![3 corrupted files from page 16. [m10], Series’ Los Manolos, Plan Caracas No, 2, 1974-1976](https://res.cloudinary.com/dao1vqck0/image/upload/w_800,h_800,c_limit,q_auto:good,f_auto,fl_progressive/v1771349907/8_thvlqw.jpg)
3 corrupted files from page 16. [m10], Series’ Los Manolos, Plan Caracas No, 2, 1974-1976
Balteo-Yazbeck, Alessandro
2006−2008
Archival fine art print from corrupted digital files produced by faulty scanner
Los Manifestantes (The Demonstrators)
Bunimov, Mariana
2023
Oil on canvas
Balteo-Yazbeck, Alessandro
Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck is a Venezuelan artist whose multidisciplinary practice intertwines art, research, curatorial methods, and historical analysis into a critical reflection on modernity and its enduring political and cultural consequences. Through photography, film, installation, and found materials, his work explores the complex intersections between aesthetics, power, and ideology. Balteo-Yazbeck investigates the narratives that shape global politics, economy, and culture, exposing how systems of representation have contributed to the dehumanizing effects of modern history
Bunimov, Mariana
Mariana Bunimov’s paintings “set her interlocutor in the middle of a crossroads where, with no hierarchy or apparent connection, thousands of images hailing as much from her imagination as from her daily round cross paths. Defying any kind of criterion or absolute, the eclectic nature of her world is also the reflection of the spirit of our time, the zeitgeist: a fragmented and hybrid world where the permanent flow of many different and divergent images and data converges in an ongoing immediacy which goes beyond any given geography or timeframe.” Lives and works in Paris.