Yoshua Okón
Born	1970 Mexico City
Alma mater	Concordia University University of California, Los Angeles
Awards	Fulbright Program (2000–2002)
Website	https://www.yoshuaokon.com/

Yoshua Okón (Mexico City, 1970) is a Mexican artist whose work is part of major art collections throughout the world. He is co-founder of La Panadería, an art space that operated between 1994 and 2002, and of SOMA, a contemporary art school.^[1] Mexican art critic Cuauhtémoc Medina points out that Okón burst onto the Mexican art scene as a child prodigy. At age twenty-seven he produced works that promptly gained iconic value such as “A propósito” (1997), a sculpture made with 120 stolen car stereos obtained on the black market accompanied by a video in which Okón and Miguel Calderón steal a car stereo, and “Chocorrol” (1997). a visual registry of copulation between a xoloiztcuintle dog and a french poodle.^[2][3] Okón’s work blends staged situations, documentation and improvisation, and questions habitual perceptions of reality and truth, selfhood and morality.^[4]

Education

Okón studied a BFA at Concordia University in Montreal. He later attended UCLA on a Fulbright scholarship where he received an MFA.^[5]

Work

Although video has been predominant in Yoshua Okón’s practice, his work has also explored sculpture, drawing, painting and installation. As artist Paul MacCarthy has described, the Mexican artist’s practice cannot be classified into notions such as “video art” or “expanded cinema”, because the works have a physical presence that links them directly to sculpture and installation, “with the purpose of the viewer making some kind of association. So, it means that the work involves video, and the video is then placed into some type of situation.”^[6]

According to art historian Helena Chávez MacGregor, Okón’s work situates us within the realm of the absurd as a critical and political strategy. His work experiments and redeploys the structured ambivalence of today’s world in order to turn the work of art into a tool for sabotaging common sense. Chávez MacGregor also mentions that it is important to place Okón’s work in a context of market deregulation, where neoliberal policies and the narrative of globalization allowed artists of his generation to no longer be governed by the national or by an old leftist tradition (co-opted in Mexico by the Institutional Revolutionary Party). This is relevant because it sets the parameters to understand more clearly the political nature of his production, which deliberately moves away from a militant agenda, to concentrate on fissuring, breaking and unsettling the rules of the status quo.^[2]

In later years, Okón has taken a different approach with his work. “The irony that served as a form of rebellion in the nineties later became a sophisticated means of unveiling. In his early works, forms of tension –whether racial, class-based, or political– operated as mirrors reflecting viewers’ social prejudices back at them. In more recent works, the intervention lies in puncturing these reflective surfaces in order to connect different processes, draw constellations of political and affective territories, and show how the most intimate aspect of our being is part of a complex domination machine.”^[7] “My own involvement and that of the audience are fundamental. From the hyper-local, my work tends to be a critique of the structural violence of dominant mainstream culture. We all inhabit capitalism; I’m not interested in doing moralistic or didactic work. I prefer to get into the mud; my works speak from that place, from a place where we are necessarily and inevitably part of the representation that is being presented.”  Joining a tradition of highly directed situations that fuse social reality with carefully calculated artifice, participants in Okón’s works represent themselves as players in an interconnected and interdependent constellation in which we all participate: “I am interested in exploring the extent to which historical, economic and political forces define us all, the extent to which we are determined by our systems”, says Okón himself about his work. The artist recalls that his work tends to be a critique through laughter. The use of humor, although harsh and dark, is aimed at reflection, so his critical position can be considered satirical, but not cynical. Okón accepts that misused humor can trivialize the discussion, but if one manages to transcend its superficiality it can be a profound, critical and productive tool. “The moment you laugh you are inside, you are engaged and questioning who you are, and it is harder to dismiss what is being presented... you are already laughing at yourself. Black uncomfortable humor can be self-reflexive. In Walter Benjamin’s words: “there's no better trigger for thinking than laughter”.^[2]

John C. Welchman comments on the political scope of Okón’s work, as he focuses on issues of conflict and violence: “Ranging in one dimension from street disputes to out and out war and in another from domestic to institutional locations, questions of conflict and violence have long been central to the work of Yoshua Okón. One might say that the artist has organized his engagement with the social and political economies of conflict as kind of operating system for the edgy compound of irony, assumption, voyeurism and critique that underwrites his working method.”^[8]

According to Andrew Berardini, Okón’s work, “rather than making us feel good about his social collaboration, the artist and his collaborators turns around and delivers our preconceived notions back to us as a very dark kind of comedy, where the jokes and pantomimes made by the community show them playing with their own negative stereotypes”.^[6]

La Panadería and SOMA

In 1993, Okón co-founded La Panadería, an experimental art space, together with Miguel Calderón. This space had a profound impact in an emergent contemporary art culture in Mexico City.^[9]

In 2009, he was one of the founding members of SOMA, an independent art school.^[10][11]

Exhibitions and Collections

Okón has had solo exhibitions at Hammer Museum, MUAC, Museo Amparo, Viafarini, Galerie Mor Charpentier, ASU Art Museum, Blaffer Museum, Ghebaly Gallery, and Colby Museum, among others.^{[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]}

His work has been collected by museums such as the Tate Modern, Hammer Museum, LACMA, Fundación ARCO, National Gallery of Victoria, Colección Jumex, and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo. He has participated in the biennials of Istanbul, Manifesta, and Havana, among others.^{[21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]}

References

External links

• Official website