Associação Cultural Videobrasil

A peculiar way of being on scene, questionings about memory, and an ease for switching to and fro between the realms of sensations and of facts; these are all features of the video work of Graciela Taquini (born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1941). From her early 1980s experiments until her burst of productivity in recent years, Taquini's artistic achievements have always been a branch apart in Graciela's close professional relationship with electronic art, especially Argentine electronic art. The holder of a degree in art history with specializations in Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Rome, and Washington, Taquini pioneered the promotion of Argentine electronic art, be it in the subject of books such as Buenos Aires Video X and Veinte Años de Video Arte en la Argentina or in her prestigious career as international curator. Her obsessions, namely fostering electronic art and the renewal of TV language through experimentation, have also driven her work in Argentine cultural government institutions, which she has been doing for twenty years now. 

Taquini showed creative power from the very start with her debut work, Roles (1988), in which she used recordings of passages or moments of her own life-at times as a dreamy adolescent, at others as a laureate intellectual-to discuss how socially imposed roles override the complexity of individuals. In the background, different voices recite academic titles and cursings in the same monotonous tone, as an old song, Only You, makes the idea of being unique sound old-fashionedly romantic.

A long time elapsed between her debut and her sophomore work, Psycho x Borges (1997). Built around a statement by Jorge Luis Borges in which he ironizes the dominating mother and submissive son portrayed in Hitchcock's movie, the film evokes the underground, experimental nature of Argentine video art. 

In the following years, working as General Manager of Buenos Aires museums, the artist applied her experimental principles to the institutional field, producing and writing scripts for videos such as Nueve Museos, Juguetes, and Primer retrato de Buenos Aires, Emeric Essex Vidal, which deals with the city's art collections, artworks, and museums. 

In 2000, working along with Carlos Trilnik for Buenos Aires' Channel 7, she created the Play Rec cycle, consisting of twenty-one special shows which presented an extensive map of Argentine contemporary art, grouping up artworks and artists' statements in sections dedicated to women, the role of landscapes in artwork, and other subjects. In the same period, working as a curator, Taquini participated in the Interferencias Biennial in Belfort, France; produced the Argentine video art exhibitions Trampas (en torno al simulacro) and the traveling Trampas 2; and created video selections that were screened in Germany and Spain. 

Lo Sublime/Banal (2003), a sequence shot that would win her the State of the Art Award at the 15th Videobrasil (2005), was her following work. The video depicts the author and her friend Felicitas in the intimacy of a Buenos Aires kitchen, preparing a delirious dessert as they reminisce on the long-gone day when they bumped into Argentine writer Julio Cortázar in an obscure Paris pizzeria. The work was commissioned by the Buenos Aires City TV channel Ciudad Abierta, for which Taquini worked as a consultant from 2003 onwards-the guidelines of which include receptiveness to independent productions, the new Argentine cinema, auteur documentaries, and experimentalism. 

In 2005, Taquini created the Resonancia installation and the Granada video, sibling works born of a single document: the video statement in which Andrea Fasani, artist and former militant of the Juventude Peronista [Peronist Youth] tells the Arquivo Argentino de Testemunhas [Argentina Witness Archive] how she was kidnapped, imprisoned, and tortured by the country's Army in the 1970s. Commissioned by the Museo de Arte y Memoria de La Plata, Resonancia features excerpts of the statement, which was re-recorded by the artists, along with images from inside a human body. The subject of Granada, the title of which alludes to a song Fasani heard during the bizarre celebration she was forced to witness in prison, is the very re-recording of the statement, as Taquini directs Fasani, repeating and making her repeat excerpts from a transcript of her original statement. That which the first work had only hinted at, became explicit in the second work; both are ruled by the difficulty (and by the inescapable need) of moving along memory's darkest labyrinths.

Magnetic resonance imaging, reminiscent of the uncomfortable physicality of the body, would later reappear in El Cuerpo, a series of four TV shows codirected by Taquini that same year. The series is perhaps the ultimate example of the genre she dubs “auteur documentary.” The author deals with issues such as the erotic body, the virtual body, and the excluded bodies by painting a fluid picture of superimposed information where images, stories, and questionings taken from her own personal history are as important as references to art history and birth statistics from Argentina. According to Taquini, the show is a defining example of her contribution to the TV channel.

Taquini's most recent work, the documentary film Tras Eduardo Kac (2006), stems from the exhibition of the Brazilian artist that she created for the Espacio Fundación Telefónica, in Buenos Aires. Eduardo Kac, Obras vivas y en red culled together the installations Génesis, Move 36, and Teleporting an Unknown State, plus photographs, objects, and the Rabbit Remix publications, featuring a transgenic rabbit supposedly created by Kac. It was one of Taquini's most celebrated curatorships since Vertigo-a collection of site specifics by artists Augusto Zanela, Martín Bonadeo, and Nushi Muntaabski for Malba (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires), and Horizonte/Desierto-Argentine video selections exhibited at the Champ Libre Biennale in Montreal, Canada, both dated 2004.

During that same period, Taquini participated in exhibitions and festivals in Latin America, France, the United States, and in the 15th Videobrasil as artist, curator, and jury member, and won consecutive awards from the Argentine critics association and from her country's government for her cultural dissemination work. The curator of the Electronic Art section of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, in 2005 she received the title of Honorary Consultant Professor from the Escuela de Comunicación y Diseño Multimedial at Universidad Maimonides, a Buenos Aires-based institution that provides support for her production, academic, and curatorial activities in the field of electronic art.