Said Dokins presents solo show Runaway Writings at the Arts Center of San Luis Potosí

The Arts Center of San Luis Potosí (CEART San Luis) presents for the first time the work of the Mexican visual artist Said Dokins with the retrospective exhibition Runaway Writings (Escrituras en fuga), celebrating 22 years of artistic trajectory. The show gathers pieces developed by the artist on the last decade, along with pieces created especially for this space.

Located in a building that operated as a prison since the 19^th Century, CEART’s history has been the inspiration source for the plastic and curatorial proposal which assembles the traces of those who inhabited this former enclosure and punishment place with Dokins central inquiries in his artistic experimentation throughout his career, focused in unravel the processes of memory construction by means of inscription and resignification of the symbolic that takes place through the interaction of subjects with the public space. For Dokins, writing as a gesture, as an aesthetic and political action, opens the possibility to generate new grammars of the visible.

Runaway Writings displays an unseen artwork panorama of an artist considered one of the most important exponents of contemporary urban calligraphy worldwide. The show is organized in three sections which, according to the curator, Claudia de la Garza, follow questions that Dokins has drawn up through the years, intertwining a repertoire of images, objects, and gestures, where words become meeting points, places of conflict or opportunities of creating community. The show includes works on paper, on canvas, installations, video, light, photography, and a lot of calligraphy.

Walls and Borders

The first section, Walls and Borders, encompasses works that reflect on the idea of border from a formal notion, as a line, as a contour, to its effects as a geographical and political limit, capable of define lives of those who are placed on one side or the other.

Traces, scars and silences

Traces, scars and silences is the second section of the show. It looks at the idea of inscription as a mark that runs through space and time, but also though bodies.

Sparkles. On time and memory

Finally, the third section, entitled Sparkles. On time and memory, explores the investigations of the artist on light writing, which can be traced back to 2004, up to his latest project, Heliographies of Memory, that he develops since 2015 with the photographer Leonardo Luna, intervening with his light calligraphy monuments and plazas around the word.