Please join us for a unique performance by Mexican artist Mariela Sancari. The Two-Headed Horse: Reenactment in 10 Acts is a series of ten photographs turned into a theater play.

The performance will begin promptly at 7:30 and will last about 30 minutes.

Artist's Statement:

I

A play is a structure. Parliaments and actions are the elements of this structure. These are spoken aloud and acted, transmitted by characters that in themselves are part of the structure.

The structure has a meaning, which we can discover by adding together the different elements, actions and characters. The characters are not what they claim to be. The characters are what their function within the structure of the play tells us they are.

Ulises Carrión.

II

Abundant is the discussion about reality and photography, about the reality that a photograph is able to capture.

Dozens of authors, theoreticians and photographers have debated and argued this subject until almost stripping the image of its value as a document, as a proof of the real.

There is, however, some truth in the image. An encounter with the real, a shadow, a trace. "The real, to put it in some way, has burned a hole in the image", says Walter Benjamin. That hole

is the shadow of the image that stalks us. And the truth to which the image refers (or testifies), is the truth of the experience of which it is residue, the contact with the real to which it has survived.

III

The two headed horse: Reenactment in ten acts. A series of ten photographs turned into a theater play.

IV

Two actresses on stage playing sisters for a seemingly absent audience. Recreations of past scenes, scenes they already performed some time ago. They will experience hesitations and

ramblings when trying to understand their past.

V

Based on the statement that the meaning of any image lies in its destination[i], I have created a new body of work that resignifies the photographs from a previous series of mine called

The two headed horse –staged self-portraits with my twin sister addressing memory and fiction–, not necessarily for what we see in them, but for the role they have in a narrative, in relation

with one another. Conceived as a theater play –a sort of tableau vivant– the intention is to activate the images through text –dialogues and parliaments– questioning the reliability of photography and the processes through which we understand what we see.

I rephotographed the images of the series –engaging each one of them as an theater act itself– seeking to problematize the figurative content of my pictures –characters and their actions–

while also posing questions about formal and philosophical aspects of staging images. In this iteration, the reenactment of the representation –the body as tool, setting, method and space–

is intended to activate the latency in the images.

Images are no longer what they represent but their relations to the other components in this play, in this representation of the real that burned a hole in the images.

[i] David Campany. “The meaning of any image is in its destination.” in 1000 words Magazine.