Olnick Spanu Art Program artist Bruna Esposito has been selected to participate in the upcoming XIII Bienal de Cuenca Impermanencia (October 21 – December 31, 2016, Cuenca, Ecuador), curated by Dan Cameron.

For most of its recorded history, an essential quality of visual art has been the effort made to prolong its existence. If an artwork was deemed truly important, then the responsibility fell to its owners or custodians to ensure that it was safely conveyed from one generation to the next; failure to do so could only be rationalized by calamity on the scale of war or conflagration.

The XIII Bienal de Cuenca, Impermanencia, proposes to bring together a geographically and stylistically diverse group of artists who share an interest in mirroring the frailties and follies of human existence relative to our fundamentally fleeting existence. In its emphasis on the viewer’s internal responsiveness to the works on view, the 13th Bienal de Cuenca also subtly challenges certain preconditions of ownership with respect to works of art, which in the final analysis are more the patrimony of all humankind than a single museum, state, or individual.

As a thematic concept, impermanence, also one of the guiding precepts of Buddhism, is increasingly characteristic of the lives we lead today, when art’s value seems less rooted in the precondition that its appearance be preserved intact a hundred or thousand years from now, and instead is increasingly defined by its ability to connect with us in the present, fleeting moment of our exchange with it, even if a week from now it has vanished without a trace.

Further information on the Bienal de Cuenca can be found here.