Article
Transformation through language and ideas
Humberto Vélez was born in Panama City in 1965. After studying Law and Political Sciences at the University of Panama, he went to the International School of Cinema of San Antonio de los Banos, Cuba to study filmmaking and TV in 1990. Since 1997 he has lived in England and works internationally as an artist and independent filmmaker. He has been an artist in residence in Havana, Vienna and London and represented Panama at the Lima Biennial in 2002. His work has been described as ‘a metaphor for love, sex and mortality’. He transforms the everyday into something personal, strange and unrecognisable.
Born in Panama City in 1965, Humberto Vélez first studied Law and Political Sciences at the University of Panama. He then received a bursary to study Filmmaking and TV in Cuba at the International School of Cinema of San Antonio de los Banos, funded by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Since 1997 he has lived and worked in Manchester and he also spends time in Barcelona and Panama.
Vélez works as an artist and independent filmmaker, creating installations, performances and events. Rather than fabricating objects in his artwork, he transforms them through language and ideas, suggesting an array of connotations that dislodge their specificity. Vélez makes use of very diverse materials and techniques appropriated from both the popular and the high-tech, from traditional and contemporary realms.
His early interest was in ritualising and parodying social mores. Now he goes beyond this in order to explore the way in which people relate emotionally and verbally to their corporal, psychic and geographical territories. Vélez´s installations are imbued with a characteristic mix of seriousness and humour. He uses video, photography and CD-Rom to explore emotional states and to transform everyday objects into something personal, strange and unrecognisable.
For MultipleCity in Panama City in 2003, Vélez worked with a brass and marching band, known as the Banda del Hogar, formed of students of a family-operated sewing and vocational school. Every year it parades in Panama on Independence Day, projecting a mystique that parallels Panamanians’ fascination with patriotic fanfare. Together Vélez and the school made banners fusing his personal input with the band’s unique style. During MultipleCity, La Banda del Hogar gave parades and performances at the ‘wrong’ place and time.
At Gasworks Studio, London, Vélez was in residence in 2001. He presented ‘The Caretaker’ at his open studio event, a video installation combining hallucinations, obsessions and memories. The piece is set in Manchester’s Victoria Baths, one of Britain’s finest historic swimming pool complexes which closed in 1993. The residency concluded with ‘L’Avventura’ an installation piece at St Peter’s Church, Vauxhall, where Vélez hung a giant papier mache piñata in the shape of a pterodactyl, suspended high above the church aisle. He also led a workshop with children from a local primary school - La Fiesta de la Piñata. The project was inspired by fantasies and scientific discoveries of the Victorian era.
L’Avventura was subsequently shown at the Victoria Baths in Manchester where it hung dramatically above the pool. The piece considered themes of freedom and death, the relationship between emotions and social restrictions, desire and control, fantasy and reality.
Humberto Vélez was selected to present the centrepiece of the Lima Biennial in 2002. Here he presented ‘Lokin4LVnthXXCntry’, an enormous Concorde plane created with the traditional techniques of piñata makers: a wire frame covered with monotone recycled papers. Rosina Cazali reviewed the show for ArtNexus. ´From above, in the huge reception room of the Rimac house located in the historic centre of Peru’s capital, the work seemed to observe the mortals who walked under its belly, recalling the duality in which a piñata perishes: children’s parties and traumas. In its artisanal fragility and totemic airs, it was raised as the perfect relationship between love and hate that emerges between modernity’s utopia (or orphanhood) and the weight of reality. It graphically recalled the enormous social and political difficulties in which we find ourselves immersed, the fragility of our democratic systems.´
Humberto Vélez took part in the Havana Biennale in 2003 where he collaborated with the group Krystal. The resulting work, ´A Song for the Havana Biennale (Because Love Does Not Exist)´, was a series of performances in public spaces in Havana in which songs about love and financial hardship were created and played.
The artist has also participated in the Brixton Market Flypitch artists initiative in South London.
Vélez works as an artist and independent filmmaker, creating installations, performances and events. Rather than fabricating objects in his artwork, he transforms them through language and ideas, suggesting an array of connotations that dislodge their specificity. Vélez makes use of very diverse materials and techniques appropriated from both the popular and the high-tech, from traditional and contemporary realms.
His early interest was in ritualising and parodying social mores. Now he goes beyond this in order to explore the way in which people relate emotionally and verbally to their corporal, psychic and geographical territories. Vélez´s installations are imbued with a characteristic mix of seriousness and humour. He uses video, photography and CD-Rom to explore emotional states and to transform everyday objects into something personal, strange and unrecognisable.
For MultipleCity in Panama City in 2003, Vélez worked with a brass and marching band, known as the Banda del Hogar, formed of students of a family-operated sewing and vocational school. Every year it parades in Panama on Independence Day, projecting a mystique that parallels Panamanians’ fascination with patriotic fanfare. Together Vélez and the school made banners fusing his personal input with the band’s unique style. During MultipleCity, La Banda del Hogar gave parades and performances at the ‘wrong’ place and time.
At Gasworks Studio, London, Vélez was in residence in 2001. He presented ‘The Caretaker’ at his open studio event, a video installation combining hallucinations, obsessions and memories. The piece is set in Manchester’s Victoria Baths, one of Britain’s finest historic swimming pool complexes which closed in 1993. The residency concluded with ‘L’Avventura’ an installation piece at St Peter’s Church, Vauxhall, where Vélez hung a giant papier mache piñata in the shape of a pterodactyl, suspended high above the church aisle. He also led a workshop with children from a local primary school - La Fiesta de la Piñata. The project was inspired by fantasies and scientific discoveries of the Victorian era.
L’Avventura was subsequently shown at the Victoria Baths in Manchester where it hung dramatically above the pool. The piece considered themes of freedom and death, the relationship between emotions and social restrictions, desire and control, fantasy and reality.
Humberto Vélez was selected to present the centrepiece of the Lima Biennial in 2002. Here he presented ‘Lokin4LVnthXXCntry’, an enormous Concorde plane created with the traditional techniques of piñata makers: a wire frame covered with monotone recycled papers. Rosina Cazali reviewed the show for ArtNexus. ´From above, in the huge reception room of the Rimac house located in the historic centre of Peru’s capital, the work seemed to observe the mortals who walked under its belly, recalling the duality in which a piñata perishes: children’s parties and traumas. In its artisanal fragility and totemic airs, it was raised as the perfect relationship between love and hate that emerges between modernity’s utopia (or orphanhood) and the weight of reality. It graphically recalled the enormous social and political difficulties in which we find ourselves immersed, the fragility of our democratic systems.´
Humberto Vélez took part in the Havana Biennale in 2003 where he collaborated with the group Krystal. The resulting work, ´A Song for the Havana Biennale (Because Love Does Not Exist)´, was a series of performances in public spaces in Havana in which songs about love and financial hardship were created and played.
The artist has also participated in the Brixton Market Flypitch artists initiative in South London.
Author: Judith Staines
Bio
Humberto Vélez was born in Panama City in 1965. He studied Law and Political Sciences at the University of Panama, followed in 1990 by studies in Filmmaking and TV at the International School of Cinema of San Antonio de los Banos, Cuba, funded by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Since 1997 he has lived in Manchester in England and works internationally as an artist and independent filmmaker. He has been an artist in residence in Havana, Vienna and London, including a Triangle Arts Workshop residency at Gasworks Studios.
Works
GROUP EXHIBITIONS (Selected)
Exhibition / Installation
2004 Shanghai Biennale
2003 Havana Biennale, ´Porque el Amor no existe(Una cancion para la Bienal)/Because Love does not
exist(A song for the Havana Biennial)´
2003 Flypitch at Brixton Market, London
2003 ´La Banda de mi Hogar´, parades-performances, CiudadMultipleCity, Panama City
2002 ´Lokin4LVnthXXCntry´, site installation, III Iberoamerican Biennale, Lima, Peru
2002 ´El Guachiman´ (The Caretaker), video, Centro American Biennial, Managua, Nicaragua
2001-02 ´Policies of the Difference: Iberoamerican Art in the End of the Century´, touring exhibition to Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Madrid, Paris, Valencia.
2001 ´Chaque reve est un pays´, site installation, V Periferic Biennale, Romania
2001 ´Intrusiones urbanas en el arte joven panameno´, installations, Centr Cultural Andres Bello, Bogota
1997 ´Cybers´, documentary, Sonar Festival, Barcelona
1996 various videos, III Festival de Video Alternativo, Barcelona
1995 ´Cybers´, First Manchester Short Film & Video Festival
1992 ´The Supremes´, video, Festival de Cine Joven, Havana, Cuba
SOLO EXHIBITIONS (Selected)
Exhibition / Installation
2002 ´L´Avventura´, site installation, Vauxhall Church, London
2000 ´Instalaciones´, Installations, Museum of Contemporary Art of Panama, various medias
1998 ´Traumland/La Tierra Sonada/Dreamland´, video installation and CD-Rom, Cafe Savoy, Vienna.
1996 ´El Amor´ (Love), installation, Museum of Contemporary Art of Panama
1996 ´Cafe Tropical´, installation, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design of Costa Rica
Merits
2001/02 Gasworks Studios, London, residency
1998 Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Vienna, Residency
1990 International School of Cinema and TV, San Antonio de Los Banos, Cuba, filmmaking studies.
1998 Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Vienna, Residency
1990 International School of Cinema and TV, San Antonio de Los Banos, Cuba, filmmaking studies.
Www
CiudadMultipleCity project - Panama City
website in English and Spanish
ArtNexus
2002 Review of 3rd Ibero-American Biennial of Lima, author: Rosina Cazali
