[Exhibition]
Conversación: Photo Works by Muriel Hasbun and Pablo Ortiz Monasterio

About This Event

Presented as part of FotoWeekDC, this exhibition will highlight the year-long visual
exchange of looking and response that flourished between the two photographers, letting us in on their conversation about Mexico, photographic discourse, and friendship

"This exhibition represents a year-long collaboration between the two artists, one from Mexico and one an annual visitor to Mexico which with a single photograph sent by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio as a digital file to Muriel Hasbun, who replied by sending back one of her own. This exchange went on for months. Each responded to the next image in his or her own way, not knowing where the accumulating sequence was leading or what its narrative content ultimately might be. Other than agreeing on the ground rules, they did not discuss what they were doing while the exchange was taking place.

The show thus uses photography to probe the possibilities of cultural and visual exchange in a digital age. Taking place over the Internet, with one artist in Mexico City and one in Washington, D.C., the conversation is a wordless interplay of information and meaning.

Indeed, Conversación is ultimately about how art is made and how meaning is constructed. Every move the artists make is smart in an intellectual sense but also deeply intuitive, a gesture of not knowing more than it is of knowing. To trust each other in this process, to collaborate in the territory of risk and uncertainty where one can feel vulnerable and even foolish, is as much an accomplishment for these artists as is the beauty of the individual images and the mystery of their sequencing."

- Excerpt from an essay on the exhibition by writer, curator and teacher Andy Grundberg

Gallery Hours: Monday to Friday, 10am to 6pm; Saturday, 12 to 4pm