The School of Art annually hosts the VASE lecture series, from visiting artists and scholars, at the Center for Creative Photography. The first lecture in this academic year’s lineup featured Yoshua Okón and took place in the CCP auditorium at 5:30 p.m. on Oct. 16. Many students and viewers filled the auditorium ready to learn and even came prepared with questions.

Okón is an artist from Mexico City who earned his Masters of Fine Arts from UCLA with a Fulbright scholarship. Okón co-founded La Panadería in 1994 with artist Miguel Calderón, an exhibition space for rising Mexican artists who are using unconventional mediums. He currently works with other artists to run SOMA, an investigative art group that looks at what art can be in different contexts.

Okón’s works, which include video installations, photography, performances and more, have been exhibited around the world and are in important collections such as the Tate Modern, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Colección Jumex and more. Last year, his collaborative piece “Demo” with ASU professor Juan Obando was exhibited at Tucson’s own Museum of Contemporary Art.

“Broadly framed, his output complicates the boundary between reality and fiction, examining contradictions and absurdities that reveal the mechanics that underlie politics, market systems and neoliberal ideologies. His work critiques systems of power, and interrogates how we understand reality, truth and autonomy,” Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs, professor David Taylor, said about Okón’s work.

“I consider myself generally a happy person and I really enjoy life, but I do also notice a lot of violence around me. I think the neoliberal form of capitalism is a very violent system, that’s why in my work I’m interested in addressing systemic violence beyond official narratives that usually explain it in a simplistic and deceiving way,” Yoshua Okón said.

Okón began the lecture by showcasing one of his early works from the 1990s, “Oríllese a la Orilla,” a series of videos of policemen from Mexico. Each video had no script, no rehearsal and was taken in a single shot. Okón invited the policemen to his studio to engage in a fight, and another to perform with his baton, after he saw him playing with it in the streets. He offered to pay them, and one agreed to be a part of the video as long as he got to insult Okón. “Well, generally speaking, we like to be in front of cameras, we enjoy it. I mean look at today’s world,” Okón responded after being asked about the motivation each policeman had for being a part of the series.

According to Okón, the vertical format barely existed at this time, but he shot them that way for the installation, and how they would be viewed. He had always wondered how to use the video medium in a way that engages participation, opposed to how it had been passively consumed. “It was very important to create this tension between documentary and reality. For the public to ask these questions. ‘How real is this?’ […] ’How fictional is what I’m watching?’ In reality this is both. It’s very artificial of course, and I’m asking them to come into my studio, but at the same time, I’m not in full control, there’s no script,” Okón said about “Oríellese a la Orilla.”

The next piece Okón shared was from 2011, called “Octopus.” This was created almost a decade after he received his MFA, when he was invited by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles to do a research residency. This piece is inspired by undocumented day laborers who get hired in Home Depot parking lots, and what he read about the Guatemalan civil war. The work contains a group of ex-guerillas reenacting the civil war they fought in, in the Home Depot parking lot. 

It consisted of many rehearsals where the actors showed the moves they used in the war, and then created choreography to be performed in the parking lot, which he had no control over.

“The sense that I got was that they were excited to engage in something that was about who they are, their history. Hardly anyone knows that the U.S. invaded Guatemala, and how that connects to them being here now. They were excited to kind of be a part of this […] and the tension of the shoot had more to do with being kicked out of the parking lot than anything else to be honest,” Okón said. “When I made this piece I really wanted to talk about forced migration, in the context of geopolitics, and in the context of the U.S. foreign policy, and mostly in the context of global capitalism and this kind of violence that is invisible to us, and that is pretty much behind forced migration […] I wanted to give that kind of dimension to war, opposed to the glorification of war that never gives the full picture.”

Next, Okón talked about “Oracle,” a piece he made in 2014 in Oracle, Arizona, after getting an invitation from the ASU Art Museum to produce a new work and do an exhibition. This piece was inspired by the news of unaccompanied children coming into the United States from Central America, and the news of a big protest happening in Oracle, about protecting the border. He thought of this piece as a second part of “Octopus,” and the actors reenacted their protest. “There’s kind of an organic aspect to the way these works get created because I usually work with what I find in the world […] and then from there, I build. And in different cases, the degree of fiction can vary depending on the ideas that I come up with and the specifics of the situation,” Okón said. When starting a work, he always approaches people as an artist and explains the context of the art and the exhibit.

Due to time, the night briefly ended with a debut of Okón’s brand new piece that he had just shot and edited. “I’m hoping that through my art, people reflect around the issues that I’m presenting […]. I’m not interested in them reaching any specific conclusion, but I like the reflexive process in itself, the expansion of consciousness and the understanding of the world in more complex and nuanced ways. That’s one of the main reasons why I make art,” Okón said.

There are still two VASE lectures the public can attend, with the next one taking place next year in February. Dates, times and an about page for each speaker can be found on the VASE website.

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