The practice of Alexander Apóstol (Barquisimeto, Venezuela, 1969), who lives and works between Caracas and Madrid, has spent three decades exposing the fractures of the modernist project. With a critical look at his native Venezuela and South American tendencies, he excavates the visual systems through which power performs itself: the colors that identify a political party, the architecture that enshrines a national project, the aesthetic languages that democracy borrows and authority ultimately absorbs.
Quítate tú pa’ ponerme yo! takes its name from a Caribbean colloquial expression rooted in an individualistic mindset that conceives political change as the mere replacement of figures in power rather than a transformation of the underlying structures that sustain them. This logic has fostered a permissive attitude towards political succession and imposed replacement of power beneath the promise of change. The exhibition brings together three interconnected bodies of work spanning 2012 to the present, through photography and video, inviting us to see what abstraction can display in politics, with its unkept promises of progress, democracy, and collective life.