Santiago Forero
(COLOMBIA)
Santiago Forero is the artist behind Cell-Portraits / Story About Friends, one of the 4 projects that form FUTURO by Newwer.
(CELL-PORTRAITS / STORY ABOUT FRIENDS)
In Story about Friends Forero features his ten-year old niece when she was just as tall as him, as the series “Story about Gnomes” follow up. These two friends create a world inside a frame where they contrast and relationship between childhoods and adulthoods identity and transformation, from a place where both bodies look similar at first glance but in reality they are pretty different.
In Cell-Portraits, Forero takes on the concepts of “selfies” as a photographic practice than has morphed the “self portrait” idea, an idea that until very recently was exclusive to artists, now being challenged by social media, leaving it inside a gray area. These portraits pretend to bring both conceptions together, taking the “selfie” as a disposable photo and starting a conversation where the self-portrait is an artistic piece and act of contemplation.
(BIO)
Born in Colombia in 1979, Santiago Forero is a visual artist graduated from the Universidad Pontificia Javeriana of Bogotá. His work goes back to 2005, and since then, has been growing exponentially, taking part on exhibitions across the globe such as La Vuelta, Les Rencontres d'Arles in France and Cuerpos que (se) miran in Ecuador, also being named “Artist of the Year” by the Austin Visual Arts Association in 2010.
Making use of different tools like photography, video and new media, his work consist mainly on self-portraits that display his unique, smart and acidic humor. Heavily influenced by the aesthetics of daily life, he reflects on society's preconceptions, standards and stereotypes, questioning how shallow, dominant and vain they can get. His photographic explorations disrupt the way we see conventional photography, self-portraits without being in the frame or turn one's back to the camera, challenging the concepts of scale and identity regarding the images context.
