At a glance
What if the real machine is your mind? David Lamelas turns space, time, film and information into art that changes according to how you perceive it.
Why go
You'll see
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Artlovers Tip
Don’t ask “what am I looking at?” Ask “what is happening to me while I look?”
Time passing, your position in the room, information arriving and your own expectations are often part of Lamelas’s material.
Artlovers relevance
Inside the exhibition
Meet the artist
Description
The Machine is structured in three interconnected parts: exhibition, film programme and performance series. Rather than telling Lamelas’s story chronologically, Dia brings works from different decades together to expose the questions that have persisted throughout his career: What is space? How do we experience time? How does information reach us? And how much does the viewer participate in constructing what an artwork means?
The title provides an important clue. For Lamelas, the “machine” is not necessarily technological. The gallery, camera, city — and ultimately the human mind — can all function as systems that process reality. His work strips art down to these mechanisms, often leaving surprisingly little conventional “object” to look at.
David Lamelas (b. 1946, Buenos Aires) emerged from Argentina’s radical 1960s avant-garde around the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella before moving internationally between Buenos Aires, London, Los Angeles, Paris and other cities. His nomadic career helped him connect Latin American experimentalism with European and American Conceptual Art. He has worked across sculpture, photography, installation, performance and experimental film for more than six decades.
