Catalogue > At random

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream. Jorge Luis Borges It is in the nature of men to be absorbed by the future as if magnetized by timeless gravity, falling deeper and deeper into their own humanity. And if in Walter Benjamin’s angelus novus we picture his gaze of horror, shaken and frightened by what he sees as he gazes upon the past, the man in his fall evinces unperturbed passivity towards the future. As in a dream state, through that suspended fall the man’s mind is a container holding past, present and future in a single consciousness. It is in this construction, as in a dream, in his mind, where man envisions and shapes the world. Out there, there may be no more than void, and the fall may be eternal. Perhaps this is the reason why we recurrently dream about falling. Perhaps falling isn’t a dream at all—perhaps falling is what’s real.

Sebastian Diaz Morales was born in the Patagonian region of Argentina, in 1975 and studied both in Argentina at the Universidad del cine de Antín and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Morales’s video work blurs fiction and documentary genres and has been screened extensively at film festivals as well as in a gallery context. With its spliced footage and stills and jumbled observations, his work follows the tradition of Latin-American narrative film. Morales plays with the structure of narrative within his work, typically documenting and constructing journeys that explore social and political concerns. His work has been exhibited widely at many prominent venues—such as the Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou; Stedelijk Museum and De Appel, Amsterdam; Art in General, New York City; Ludwin Museum, Budapest; Bienale Sao Pablo; Biennale of Sydney; Miro Foundation, Barcelona; MUDAM, Luxemburg; and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon—and is the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou; Tate Modern; Fundacion Jumex, Mexico; Sandretto Foundation, Torino; Sammlung-Goetz, Munich; and the Fundacion de Arte Moderna, Museo Berardo, Lisbon. In 2009 he was awarded with a Guggenheim Fellowship.