Hyper
Culture is a concept as abstract as it is ancient. A word difficult to decipher, as expressed, in his emblematic text Keywords (1976), by the mythical English essayist Raymond Williams, who later transferred it to the plural, referring to the ” cultures” as the specific and variable cultures of the different nations, but also to the specific and variable cultures of the social and economic groups within a nation.
APUK#1, a group exhibition that brings together the recent work of 10 Peruvian artists currently residing and producing in the United Kingdom, is located in this territory. The exhibition observes the current production of each one of them, identifying communicating links around migration, and elaborating a dialogue that highlights the fact of displacement, both anthropologically and cosmologically, building systems of representation where categories of identity and culture take shape.
In a highly globalized world marked by displacement, whether physical or virtual, the contemporary individual is confronted with a myriad of impulses that call into question the fact of identity. The artist does not escape from this. Quite the contrary. His work, influenced by stimuli configured by a context, persistently represents certain tensions linked to these processes, what the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls ” hyperculturality” : “the limits or boundaries, whose form is determined by cultural authenticity or originality, dissolve” (1). Like hypertext, where a non-sequential structure builds a communication system, the sense of hyper proposed by Byung-Chul Han, “represents the spatiality of today’s culture, cultures are approaching a hyperculture” (2).
Whether from a socio-political perspective , or from a more personal and introspective approach, the work of these 10 artists, born in Peru and based in the UK, is a clear revelation that it is not borders, but links and connections, that build the ecosystem of hyper-culture. A complex web of cultural and social conditions result in an extremely free artistic language that, like hypertext, allows to create, aggregate, link, and share a thought turned into a work. Supports, media and artistic techniques are interconnected, categories are diluted. Ideas and concepts mutate rapidly. The narrative that identifies a work as painting, sculpture or photography is becoming obsolete, and the presence of the author emerges, whose work flows in the space of hyper-culture with an unprecedented scope.
(1) Byung-Chul, H. (2018). Hyperculturality. Herder Editorial , p. 21.
(2) Ibid., p. 22.
Carlos Caamaño A.