We are delighted to present the third gallery exhibition by Sebastian Diaz Morales (*1975 in Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina) at carlier | gebauer.

In his videos and video installations, Sebastian Diaz Morales returns over and over again to an examination of the linguistic and visual possibilities of narration. He develops an unmistakable style in these works, influenced by South American avant-garde cinema, documentary approaches and experimental films. Diaz Morales repeatedly taps into the possibilities opened up by digital processing: the original video sequences become the raw material for a practice that dissects the image, rendering it unfamiliar and recomposing it. The backdrop to his most recent works is set by plumbing the depths of how images can be read and how they relate to or reproduce reality.

Diaz Morales’ four-channel video installation “Ring (The Means of Illusion)“ was displayed at “Art Unlimited”, this year’s special Art Basel exhibition, and is now being shown in Germany for the first time along with new (video)objects. In “Ring (The Means of Illusion)” the artist assembled sequences in which violence is staged as a spectacle: a boxing match, a demonstration, an agitated crowd. The reworking of the video footage makes it impossible to adopt our habitual approaches to categorising the scenes – Diaz Morales has transformed the material into black and white images reminiscent of drawings, with the original images only filtering through as a shadowy outline. Media images are repeated, alienated and thus set at a distance from the viewer. “Ring” does not narrate a story but instead, to cite Morales, compiles “visual readings of violence”.