ARCHIPELAGO

Presented by UOOORS at Torrance Art Museum.

UOOORS presents Archipelago, the Los Angeles gathering of BLAM, an ongoing exchange between artist-run initiatives in Berlin, Los Angeles, and Mexico City. UOOORS is a collective of artists working across multiple disciplines, united by an interest in the transformational and accessible nature of photography and in collaborative projects built on parallel means of expression, unpredictable overlaps, and social practice.

The Berlin artists come from Die Möglichkeit einer Insel, an artist-run project space in Berlin Mitte occupying a gutted prefabricated apartment block, one of the last completed in the former GDR. Since 2019 it has presented exhibitions, concerts, and discussions that engage space, architecture, and urbanism outside the pressures of the market.

The exhibition brings together photography, painting, collage, sculpture in bronze, metal, ceramic, hair and wood, living and indigenous plant material, and performance.

An archipelago is where things thrive and cross-pollinate. Seeds, people, promises, and forms cross water, take hold in new ground, and become unlike what they were at the point of departure. Islands are also where things are left. Built futures outlast the conditions that produced them, and what survives is a surface still carrying a claim, alongside people who arranged their lives in reliance on it. The works here move between those two conditions: propagation and residue, what takes root and what is found half-returned to the ground.

Artists working in separate cities, under separate conditions, arrive at adjacent questions. An archipelago is not a lesser continent. It is a different way of being connected, one that does not require a center and does not resolve its parts into a whole.