Land Mark, by Iván Navarro, is a soft-covered book filled with a city map of the southern tip of Manhattan Island. While the neighborhoods retain their familiar names, the streets have been renamed with body parts. This encyclopedic list of anatomy has not only taken over the city, but shifts location from page to page and map to map. This text thus shows the city as a mutable human ecosystem inhabiting, even embodying, the gridded urban plan. As the reader leafs through the book, the pages become lighter, as if overexposed, so the central pages are almost entirely white and scarcely legible.
Common threads in Iván Navarro’s work are working with light as a medium, and investigation of the idea of disappearance. In some works this relates to the victims of the Pinochet dictatorship in his native Chile, or, in an ongoing series, to the deaths in and around the World Trade Center on 9/11. In September 2011 solid architecture was turned into a cloud of dust that fell over streets far from the WTC site. Land Mark is a sombre reminder of that tragedy, writing human bodies into the grid of the city. It is also a celebration of New York as a city inhabited by countless people and their bodies, bodies made up of familiar and hidden anatomy. Navarro’s book riffs on the variety and absurdity of urban life, as the anatomy listed falls in random arrangements of common and little-used terms, making offbeat adjacencies.
Born in 1972 in Santiago de Chile, Iván Navarro has lived and worked in New York since 1997. Navarro uses light as his raw material, turning objects into electric sculptures and transforming the exhibition space by means of visual interplay. His work is certainly playful, but is also haunted by questions of power, control and imprisonment. The act of usurping the minimalist aesthetic is an ever-present undercurrent, becoming the pretext for understated political and social criticism.
