Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and Miami Beach Cinematheque at Historic City Hall present Tea by Mario Garcia Torres with an introduction by the artist.
Tea is a film essay documenting artist Mario Garcia Torres’s journey to One Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan, a hotel opened in 1971 by Italian conceptual artist Alighiero Boetti (b. 1940–d. 1994). The hotel closed due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Garcia Torres considers his relationship to Boetti’s work and life through a subjective blurring of time and geography. What does it mean to return to a place while visiting it for the first time? Might a guest become a host due to a years-late arrival? How far, really, is Afghanistan from Mexico? Garcia Torres considers these questions in his poetic inquiry into the nature of storytelling, the presumed truth of history, and the appeal of the unreachable gesture.
About Mario Garcia Torres
Mario Garcia Torres was born in 1975 in Monclova, Mexico, and lives in Mexico City. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010), the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2009), the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2009), and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2007). He has participated in the Bienal de São Paulo (2010), the Taipei Biennial (2010), and the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007).