william córdova: somewhere in time (fin pero no es el fin)

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present somewhere in time (fin pero no es el fin), a curatorial project organized by william córdova, on view October 22 through December 3, 2022.

william córdova is interested in the visuality of transition and displacement, and the adaptive potential of objects and perception across time and space. Moving from his hometown of Lima to Miami at an early age, and later residing in Houston, Chicago, and New York City, córdova explores social and material histories as a transcultural throughline between these differing environments. Incorporating contemporary literary and musical references and monuments of resistance with ancient geometries and cosmological formations, córdova opens a path to a shared network of history in the perpetual reverberations of image, sound, and revolutionary memory.

This curatorial project is centered around the life and work of the Afro-Cuban experimental filmmaker Nicolás Guillén Landrián (1938-2003). córdova presents three of Guillén Landrián’s films, depicting the infancy stage of the Cuban revolution and capturing the rhythms and movements of everyday Cuban life in the 1960s. Several of his documentary works criticized the government’s contradictory policies, making him the target of arrest and institutionalization on multiple occasions. As predecessors to the anti-neocolonialist Third Cinema movement of 1969, Guillén Landrián’s films are ephemeral sculptures—narrative offerings reflecting his positionality as an observer and interpreter of the world around him. The corresponding structure presents two large scale slightly out of focus photographs, originally taken by córdova with a Polaroid 600 camera, that resonate with Guillén Landrián’s films. The installation itself echoes the filmmaker’s polyrhythmic editing technique by proposing Fourth dimensional strategies, syncretizing secular, spiritual, material culture with urban vernacular architecture.