Ivan Argote: How to Move a Monument on a Tuesday Morning
Curated by Pilar Tompkins Rivas | 3 October 2026 – 31 January 2027
Ivan Argote (b Bogotá, 1983) is a contemporary artist working in sculpture, public installation, film, painting, and performance. His work reimagines how we use and understand public space, blending critique of historical and social injustices with moments of tenderness, humour, and poetic rebellion. Argote challenges dominant narratives and invites audiences to rethink relationships between people, power, and place.
In his upcoming solo exhibition, How to Move a Monument on a Tuesday Morning, Argote brings together sculpture and moving images to explore how monuments shape history, memory, and public space. Central to the show is Levitate, a three-channel video installation that revisits the removal of colonial-era monuments in Rome, Madrid, and Paris. Through these scenes, Argote reflects on migration, identity, and the ways historical symbols are questioned and transformed over time.
How to Move a Monument on a Tuesday Morning will also introduce new works. One, titled Wild Flowers, is a series of sculptures reproducing different parts of historic public figures, in this case being Christopher Columbus. This work continues Iván Argote's exploration of reappropriating statues commemorating nations' "great men"
Argote has created major public installations worldwide — from Venice and New York to Paris, Bogotá, São Paulo, Douala, and London — and exhibited at leading institutions such as Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Rudolfinum Gallery (Prague), MASP (São Paulo), SCAD Museum (Savannah), and MALBA (Buenos Aires). His works are held in major collections including MoMA, the Guggenheim, Centre Pompidou, Reina Sofía, LACMA, and MCA Chicago, among others. Argote lives and works in Paris, France.
Monira Al Qadiri: Alien Technology
Curated by Tairone Bastien | 4 November 2026 - 6 December 2026
Exhibition in collaboration with the Aurora Biennial 2026
Portrait of Monira Al Qadiri
Photo credit: Markus Tretter
Monira Al Qadiri (b. 1983, Kuwait) is a Kuwaiti visual artist born in Senegal and educated in Japan. Working across sculpture, installation, film, and performance, Al Qadiri draws on science fiction, autobiography, traditional practices, and popular culture to create uncanny and speculative visions of the past and future.
The works in this exhibition look to the Persian Gulf’s metamorphosis from a pearling economy to a petrostate, a profound rupture that reshaped the region’s cultures and landscapes. Al Qadiri’s grandfather experienced this shift firsthand, having worked as a singer on a pearling boat in the 1940s. In Diver (2018), synchronized swimmers in dichroic costumes evoke pearls and oil as they move to a traditional pearl-diving song. Meanwhile, Alien Technology (Tower) (2023) transforms an oil-drilling bit into a luminous, futuristic kinetic form. Its iridescent surface recalls both the sheen of petroleum and the lustre of pearls, while its strange, monumental presence conjures something between an industrial relic and a mythical being. Al Qadiri’s works invite us to consider our own moment of transformation and the new myths taking shape to help us make sense of a rapidly changing world.
Alien Technology is presented as part of the 2026 Aurora Biennial, States of Becoming, a city-wide program of free public art, performances, lectures, and artist-led experiences taking place across Dallas and Fort Worth from November 4–21, 2026. The culminating event on November 21 will be a free, outdoor exhibition displayed across Dallas City Hall, the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library, and the AT&T Discovery District, each notably in various states of becoming.