Screenshot from 'Smashing Monuments', Sebastián Díaz Morales, 2022

Screenshot from 'Smashing Monuments', Sebastián Díaz Morales, 2022

Smashing Monuments
Sebastián Díaz Morales

Exhibitions

25 Mar 2023 — 11 Jun 2023  

 

City Dome

Smashing Monuments explores the relationships we have with urban monuments. Created by artist and filmmaker Sebastián Díaz Morales for documenta fifteen, the film follows five members of the Indonesian art collective ruangrupa as they walk the streets of Jakarta, pausing to engage in one-sided conversations with the monuments that populate their city. From Indonesia’s fight for independence to ruangrupa’s own path as young citizens of the new republic – the personal and the political play out in Smashing Monuments’ half-improvised, intimate dialogues.

Presented on a largescale LED screen in Collective’s Dome gallery, Smashing Monuments invites us to think about the monuments we see each day in Edinburgh, and the relationships we have with them. From the National Monument (‘Edinburgh’s Disgrace’) just a few hundred metres from the exhibition space on Calton Hill, to the statue of Henry Dundas in St Andrew Square, which remains at the centre of an ongoing controversy and debate in the city.

For its UK premiere, Smashing Monuments will be accompanied by a programme of events and workshops, to be announced.

Produced with financial support of documenta fifteen, Mondriaan Fonds and The Kingdom of the Netherlands.


Sebastián Díaz Morales
Sebastián Díaz Morales' work has been exhibited widely at venues such as the Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou; Stedelijk Museum and De Appel, Amsterdam; Le Fresnoy, Roubaix; CAC, Vilnius; Art in General, New York City; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Biennale Sao Pablo; Biennale of Sydney; Miro Foundation, Barcelona; MUDAM, Luxemburg; Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; the Biennale di Venezia and documenta fifteen.

His works can be found at the collections of the Centre Pompidou; Tate Modern; Fundación Jumex, Mexico; Sandretto Foundation, Torino; Lemaître's collection; Constantini collection, Buenos Aires; Pinault Foundation, Paris; Sammlung-Goetz, Munich; and the Fundacion de Arte Moderna, Museo Berardo, Lisbon between others.

In 2009 he was awarded with a Guggenheim Fellowship.

ruangrupa
Founded in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2000, ruangrupa’s work is based on a holistic social, spatial and personal practice strongly connected to Indonesian culture, in which friendship, solidarity, sustainability, and community are central. “ruangrupa” translated freely means “art space” or “spatial form.”