Ivàn Argote

Born in Bogota (Colombia) in 1983, Iván Argote is a visual artist.

Through his sculptures, installations, films and interventions, Iván Argote questions our intimate relationships with other people, institutions, power, and belief systems. He develops strategies based on tenderness, affect and humour, through which he suggests critical approaches to prevailing historical narratives and attempts to decentralise them. In his interventions on monuments, large-scale installations and performances, Iván Argote proposes new symbolic uses of public space. His works are included in numerous major collections across the world, including the Guggenheim Museum (New York, United States), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), the ASU Art Museum (Phoenix, United States), the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (Miami, United States), the Colección de Arte del Banco de la República (Bogota, Colombia), Kadist (San Francisco, United States) and MACBA (Barcelona, Spain).

The project he is working on at Villa Medici is based on Rome’s heritage and the fact that the city possesses the largest number of obelisks in the world: eight from Ancient Egypt, five from the Roman era and countless other modern examples. It is their temporal and geographical journeys that Iván Argote has decided to devote himself to during his residency. There are two components to his project: a documentary film in which a pigeon is our guide in discovery of Rome’s various obelisks, and a series of onsite installations at Villa Medici, inspired by the obelisk in its gardens.