Play_gallery for still and motion picture is pleased to present a comprehensive one-man-exhibition of the Guatemalan artist A-1 53167. A-1 53167 is the code name that Aníbal López (born 1964) has used since 1997
to sign his action.

Known internationally for his participation in the Havana Biennial (2000), the Venice Biennale (2001) – where he received a special mention with Herrero, Sala, Pilson – the Prague Biennale (2003) and in collective exhibits such as “Attak” at Kunsthalle (Wien 2003) and “Todo Incluido” at Conde Duque (Madrid 2004), on this occasion A-1 53167 will present a new work titled “Do it right” specifically created for the Berlin show.

A singular blend where the clear-headed detachment of a 1960s-era conceptual artist meets the constitutionally at-risk existence of Latin guerrilleros, A-1 53167 has selected Guatemala City as home base for his work and urban actions and interventions as his modus operandi. The high level of play between art and A-1 53167 takes a personal risk on the streets. How could we forget the extreme gesture of “El Préstamo” (the Loan) where a gun-toting A-1 53167 stages an armed robbery by attacking an unwitting passer-by? The stolen money was to fund an exhibition at the "Contexto" space and thus turn the victim into sponsor and the spectator into an accomplice in the event.

A-1 53167 belongs to that politically outspoken and concerned artistic generation that penetrates the economic and information world and relentlessly insinuates itself in the relationship between the evidence of facts and the rigor of the regulatory and analytic propositions that govern and discipline our civic lives. These latter are presented in the work of A-1 53167 as linguistic definitions that the artist draws chiefly from minimal and conceptual art. Each of his works is a verification of the relationship between social reality and the precision of codes of communication, information and legislation, from the perspective of a culture poised between the coup d'etat and organized crime, between economic insolvency and the current squalor produced by contemporary Neo-Liberalism.

The exhibition “Do it Right” gathers together a series of videos and photographs produced by A-1 53167 in the past few years and featuring the relationship between legality and illegality, subjectivity and objectivity, security and terror as a central theme. The videos titled “Una tonelada de libros” (2003) and “Liston de plástico negro” (2003), together with the photographs from the “30 de junio” series (2000), witness the interventions made by A-1 53167 in Guatemala’s public spaces. But, above all, the name and the image elected to represent the exhibition refer to the normative code that is behind the prohibition thematised in the action that A-1 53167 will stage at the opening of the show. Like a master of ceremonies, he will provide the rules of the game: then it will
be up to the public to play.

Read the interview with A-1 53167 by Marco Scotini