Oscar Muñoz – Proyecto para un memorial. 2005 (Project for a Memorial)
(Artist Stalk)
23 September 2025, 15:00
Five-channel video installation without sound
7’30’’ loop
23 September – 5 October 2025
Tuesday – Saturday, 15:00 – 19:00
Șerban Savu proposes, in relation to Artist Stalk#1, the video work Proyecto para un memorial, 2005 (Project for a Memorial) by Oscar Muñoz — a five-channel video installation that will be on view at Contemporar until October 5th, Tuesday to Saturday, from 3:00 to 7:00 p.m (special opening hours during White Night of the Galleries).
About Oscar Muñoz
Born in Popayán, Colombia, Oscar Muñoz studied art at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Cali in the 1970s. As an art student, he began making drawings based on photographic images and, although his studies did not specifically include photography or audiovisual media, these media and their relationships to reality and meaning-making have subsequently become central to his artistic practice.
Muñoz is also known for his use of ephemeral materials, in poetic reflections upon memory and mortality. For example, Aliento (1995-2002) consists of a series of seemingly blank mirrors. However, when the viewer comes close to them and breathes on them, subtle obituary portraits emerge momentarily on the surface. Muñoz’s video Re/trato (2004) shows the artist painting a self-portrait with water. As the water makes contact with the hot pavement Muñoz is painting on, the portrait vanishes. Muñoz often bridges the media of film, video, photography, installation, and sculpture.
About Oscar Muñoz – Proyecto para un memorial. 2005 (Project for a Memorial)
Muñoz draws on a hot pavement in Cali, copying photographs from newspaper obituaries. He draws the portraits using water and as one nears completion, the earlier images evaporate – and he starts all over again.
‘Proyecto para un memorial [Project for a memorial] (2005) is a five-channel video installation that documents the artist’s brush strokes tracing portraits sketched out with water over hot pavement. Based on actual photographs published in newspaper obituaries that Muñoz collected over the years, each face signals an individual who, nevertheless, remains anonymous, their story untold.’ (from Maria Emilia Fernandez Nadurille – More vulnerable, more human: Oscar Muñoz at the Blanton Museum of Art)
With the kind support of: Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino
Image credits: Oscar Muñoz, Proyecto para un memorial [Ed. of 5 + 2 AP], 2004-2005. 5 videos, no sound, 7-30 min. Exhibition Silent, Hiroshima City Culture Foundation, Hiroshima, Japan, 2009
