Alejandro Sánchez

Sobre Cupo Hapag Wood

Artwork Details

Artist

Alejandro Sánchez

Title

Sobre Cupo Hapag Wood

Date

2020

Medium

Wood, plastic, metal and acrylic paint

Dimensions

35 x 50 x 12 cm

Credit Line

Art Jameel Collection

Work Description

Alejandro Sánchez continuously unpacks the role of 21st century commerce and its global impact. This informs his treatment of the container as the par excellence symbol of trade, a structure whose repetitive cycles of emptiness and fullness bring about ecological, economic, and social consequences.

Within the artist’s umbrella project Some Economies examining shipping industries and logistics, the sculpture series Sobrecupo, ‘exceeded capacity’, opens the containers’ doors to visualise the excess embedded within global supply and demand, satirising the long-travelled distances of commodities, the recognisability of shipping brands, and the economic value these represent.

With the series, the artist also grapples with the absurdity of excessively protecting exported goods in resistant metallic cases while many communities’ livelihoods in productive regions remain materially unprotected. Within his process, he builds the Sobrecupo containers with zinc sheets similar to the ones used for the roofs of low-income housing in Latin America’s most impoverished areas. Commodities, he observes, seemingly get more international and material protection than some human lives. For Sánchez, Sobrecupo is an attempt at liberating our understanding of the global economy by first liberating the shipping container from its concealment.

Artist Biography

Alejandro Sánchez (b. 1981, lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia).

Working with sculpture, public art, painting, and video, Alejandro Sánchez investigates ongoing changes in today’s Latin America, with a particular focus on Colombia. His work grapples with globalisation, democratisation, economic growth, and their role in today’s configurations of society. His primary concerns include free trade, privatisation, multinational enterprises as well as the mechanisms that uphold them. Through his artistic production, he reflects on the consequences that today’s cross-border exchanges bring about, which enable discussions surrounding social displacement and cultural uprooting.

Over the past two decades, Alejandro Sánchez has trained in visual arts, media, and production technologies in Colombia and Argentina, pursued artistic residencies in France and Switzerland, as well as exhibited in Chile, Cuba, Japan, Peru, Singapore, and the United States.