EXHIBITIONS

Miles Marchan
Sebastián Díaz Morales

April – June 25  
Exhibition view Miles Marchan, Sebastián Díaz Morales; Galerie Stadtpark Krems, 2025; Photo: Stefan Lux; Sebastián Díaz Morales; Miles Marchan (Thousands March), 2018-21; 1-channel video installation, surround sound, 60 min; Sound: Philip Miller; Courtesy: Sebastián Díaz Morales and Galerie Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Production of the film with financial support from the Mondriaan Fund
Exhibition view Miles Marchan, Sebastián Díaz Morales; Galerie Stadtpark Krems, 2025; Photo: Stefan Lux; Sebastián Díaz Morales; Miles Marchan (Thousands March), 2018-21; 1-channel video installation, surround sound, 60 min; Sound: Philip Miller; Courtesy: Sebastián Díaz Morales and Galerie Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Production of the film with financial support from the Mondriaan Fund
Exhibition view Miles Marchan, Sebastián Díaz Morales; Galerie Stadtpark Krems, 2025; Photo: Stefan Lux; Sebastián Díaz Morales; Miles Marchan (Thousands March), 2018-21; 1-channel video installation, surround sound, 60 min; Sound: Philip Miller; Courtesy: Sebastián Díaz Morales and Galerie Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Production of the film with financial support from the Mondriaan Fund
Exhibition view Miles Marchan, Sebastián Díaz Morales; Galerie Stadtpark Krems, 2025; Photo: Stefan Lux; Sebastián Díaz Morales; Miles Marchan (Thousands March), 2018-21; 1-channel video installation, surround sound, 60 min; Sound: Philip Miller; Courtesy: Sebastián Díaz Morales and Galerie Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Production of the film with financial support from the Mondriaan Fund
Exhibition view Miles Marchan, Sebastián Díaz Morales; Galerie Stadtpark Krems, 2025; Photo: Stefan Lux; Sebastián Díaz Morales; Miles Marchan (Thousands March), 2018-21; 1-channel video installation, surround sound, 60 min; Sound: Philip Miller; Courtesy: Sebastián Díaz Morales and Galerie Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Production of the film with financial support from the Mondriaan Fund
Exhibition view Miles Marchan, Sebastián Díaz Morales; Galerie Stadtpark Krems, 2025; Photo: Stefan Lux; Sebastián Díaz Morales; Miles Marchan (Thousands March), 2018-21; 1-channel video installation, surround sound, 60 min; Sound: Philip Miller; Courtesy: Sebastián Díaz Morales and Galerie Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Production of the film with financial support from the Mondriaan Fund
Exhibition view Miles Marchan, Sebastián Díaz Morales; Galerie Stadtpark Krems, 2025; Photo: Stefan Lux; Sebastián Díaz Morales; Miles Marchan (Thousands March), 2018-21; 1-channel video installation, surround sound, 60 min; Sound: Philip Miller; Courtesy: Sebastián Díaz Morales and Galerie Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Production of the film with financial support from the Mondriaan Fund
Exhibition view Miles Marchan, Sebastián Díaz Morales; Galerie Stadtpark Krems, 2025; Photo: Stefan Lux; Sebastián Díaz Morales; Miles Marchan (Thousands March), 2018-21; 1-channel video installation, surround sound, 60 min; Sound: Philip Miller; Courtesy: Sebastián Díaz Morales and Galerie Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Production of the film with financial support from the Mondriaan Fund
Exhibition view Miles Marchan, Sebastián Díaz Morales; Galerie Stadtpark Krems, 2025; Photo: Stefan Lux; Sebastián Díaz Morales; Miles Marchan (Thousands March), 2018-21; 1-channel video installation, surround sound, 60 min; Sound: Philip Miller; Courtesy: Sebastián Díaz Morales and Galerie Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Production of the film with financial support from the Mondriaan Fund
Exhibition view Miles Marchan, Sebastián Díaz Morales; Galerie Stadtpark Krems, 2025; Photo: Stefan Lux; Sebastián Díaz Morales; Miles Marchan (Thousands March), 2018-21; 1-channel video installation, surround sound, 60 min; Sound: Philip Miller; Courtesy: Sebastián Díaz Morales and Galerie Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Production of the film with financial support from the Mondriaan Fund
Exhibition view Miles Marchan, Sebastián Díaz Morales; Galerie Stadtpark Krems, 2025; Photo: Stefan Lux; Sebastián Díaz Morales; Miles Marchan (Thousands March), 2018-21; 1-channel video installation, surround sound, 60 min ; Sound: Philip Miller; Courtesy: Sebastián Díaz Morales and Galerie Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Production of the film with financial support from the Mondriaan Fund;
Exhibition view Miles Marchan, Sebastián Díaz Morales; Galerie Stadtpark Krems, 2025; Photo: Stefan Lux; Sinécdoque de una Crisis (Synecdoche for a Crisis), 2023; Led display, without sound, 68 min; Courtesy: Sebastián Díaz Morales and Galerie Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin/Madrid
Exhibition view Miles Marchan, Sebastián Díaz Morales; Galerie Stadtpark Krems, 2025; Photo: Stefan Lux; Sinécdoque de una Crisis (Synecdoche for a Crisis), 2023; Led display, without sound, 68 min; Courtesy: Sebastián Díaz Morales and Galerie Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin/Madrid
Exhibition view Miles Marchan, Sebastián Díaz Morales; Galerie Stadtpark Krems, 2025; Photo: Stefan Lux; Sinécdoque de una Crisis (Synecdoche for a Crisis), 2023; Led display, without sound, 68 min; Courtesy: Sebastián Díaz Morales and Galerie Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin/Madrid
Legende
The exhibition Miles Marchan by Argentinian artist Sebastián Díaz Morales (b. 1975) features two films that explore the tension between crowds and power. Presented in an expansive installation, the film Thousands March confronts viewers with an hour-long continuum of passing protesters, seen from ground level, while Díaz Morales’s second film, also in close-up, presents the seemingly endless handshakes of a former Argentinian president during his inauguration. The quasi-abstract video pushes the ritual of handshaking, in its seemingly endless repetition, to the point of absurdity. The gesture, which becomes ever more hollow, not only points to a gap in representation and credibility, but also seemingly foreshadows the imminent decline and collapse of the economy under that president in 2001.

Both films by Díaz Morales not only reflect on the interrelationship between crowds and power, but also explore the dialectic between the individual and the crowd. Thousands March presents the demonstrating individual in a largely depersonalized, even abstracted manner. Díaz Morales does not show faces, and there are no actual references to the political context of the protests. All that is visible are the predominantly synchronized legs and feet of the protesters, which inevitably unify, homogenize the individuals. With Díaz Morales, individuals are subsumed into the uniformity in order to unite and transform them into a cinematic-performative entity, a transpersonal “character” that is presented to the viewer on an immersive-expansive sculptural scale for more than an hour—without a dramaturgical beginning or end. The protest becomes an abstract form, the unified mass a phenomenon that, like a protagonist, is examined for its defining traits and thus portrayed independent of its surface-level, documentary presence. As the artists states, the film seeks to “infiltrate the physical form of the crowd, to empower and liberate it from visual stereotypes.”

For Thousands March, Diáz Morales documented demonstrations and rallies in Buenos Aires over a two-year period, focusing primarily on International Women’s Day (March 8) and the Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice (March 24). The artist films the protests using a gimbal-mounted monopod that is inverted to capture footage from ground level. The depth of field is set to roughly 30 cm. Drawn into the action, viewers feel very small and close to the ground. Only feet, shoes, and lower legs are visible, rarely entire people. There is also a fleeting and ephemeral quality to the imagery. At times the crowd moves, then the camera, occasionally both. In addition, the artist presents the filmed sequences as an expansive projection on a specially constructed nine-by-four-meter wall, which is slightly rotated in the exhibition space. The sheer scale of the sculptural staging intensifies the sensation of perceptual overload. The image oscillates between documentation and abstraction, becoming a kind of impressionistic visual puzzle, characterized by motion blurs and shifts in direction.

The opening moments of the film seem to suggest a documentary scene or narrative, but this certainty vanishes in the interplay of visual and auditory events. For the film, Díaz Morales collaborated with South African composer and sound designer Philip Miller, who uses the original recordings from Díaz Morales’s film footage but decouples the audio from the imagery, generating an independent narrative that still subtly corresponds to the visual sequences. As the film progresses, the action becomes more and more detached from a visual, documentary quality. Miller generates a highly differentiated continuum of voices, marching sounds, drums, horns, and repeated silences. At times the auditory scenario diverges in relationship to the imagery, while at others it exists autonomously alongside it, only to then be synchronized with the imagery again at another point.

In Thousands March, the viewer is not only confronted with various concurrent scenarios, but also different emotional impulses that converge in complex ways and inscribe one another with meaning. Visually at the six-minute mark, for instance, there’s a close-up of feet and legs, which are contrasted by the relatively distant, reverberating sound of a protest. Miller also works with momentary estrangements, such as around the ten-minute mark. Here, bagpipe- or signal-like sounds seem to gradually turn into police sirens. There always seems to be a latently uncertain quality to what appears as real, demanding that things be scrutinized. Drums beats at the sixteen-minute mark—again interpreted as bewilderment and estrangement—interrupt the muffled soundscape. They are almost reminiscent of gunshots, but a silence suddenly takes over once again.

Nearly halfway through the film, chamber music-like sounds are heard, for instance, when at the twenty-third-minute mark a distinct drumming asserts itself as a solo, seemingly answered by the somewhat tinny-sounding drumming of a distant protest. In the second half of the film, the gap between the visual and the auditory widens even further. This cognitive and synchronistic dissonance, however, does not effectuate a simple deconstruction of what is shown, what is real, but instead becomes an abstraction that seeks to evoke the viewer’s own reflections on mass crowds, power, how one is affected by and absorbed into the crowd. The sensory capacity of the listener is challenged here to actively engage with and relate to what is seen and heard. Image and sound are by no means mere traces of what transpires; they form independent narratives and emotional impulses that consistently challenge the recipient conceptually and affectively. Recipients are thus confronted with their own ways of seeing and hearing. What starts out as the intonation of a documentary evolves into an abstract portrait of crowds and power, but one that is always anchored the human being, in the de facto counterpart, and which does not lose itself in meta-politics or didactic criticism.

Diaz Morales moves beyond the documentary; in the interplay with Miller’s auditory happenings, an independent, so-called third space emerges, one that is about protest, rebellion, and resistance, and more broadly concerned with energy, emotions, mass dynamics, and the potential—but also the danger—of escalation. There is something latently threatening in what’s unpredictable and uncontrollable, a quality that is inherent to the film itself. Moments of stillness, or the potential of protestors to drop out of or come into view, infuse the scene with permanent tension. The mass of bodies gradually becomes an entity in its own right. It seemingly “acts on its own,” strives to become larger, to form a unity of equals, to merge together, and to move in one direction—this is how Elias Canetti describes the essential characteristics of crowds in Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power). The crowd/mass in Diaz Morales’s work is slow moving, yet rhythmic, caught in a permanent state of transition between moving, stopping, and standing. Diaz Morales’s film is thus not only about walking, but also about standing—metaphorically, about standing up, rising up. “The pride of the standing person,” Canetti writes, “is that he is free and leans on nothing.” In Diáz Morales’s work, groups of protestors repeatedly come to a standstill, look around for orientation, shift directions. Standing only happens intermittently and for a brief moment—when changing direction, listening, shouting slogans—and yet for the viewer of the film it also indicates a reorientation, a break in the supposed uniformity. Diáz Morales focuses on feet and legs, centering the action on the most basic “motor” of every group, every crowd. But rhythm and how it is structured also form an important commonality and serve as a means of accessing Philip Miller’s auditory and musical level. Listening to the rhythmic steps of others, and even more so, adapting to their rhythm in the interest of group allegiance (hunting, defense), mass instincts, are primary behavioral constants throughout human history and anthropology within and in relation to crowds.

In Diáz Morales’s contemplative-critical meditation, mass crowds take on an elusively expansive even imaginary dimension. According to Canetti, the crowd always strives to grow larger, thus making it impossible to determine its size since it is in a state of flux. In addition, it strives toward directional movement and can neither be tied to a specific location nor defined spatially. As the proponent of simulation theory Jean Baudrillard puts it even more radically in his book In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, the crowd realizes “the paradox of not being a subject, a group-subject, but of not being an object either.” Baudrillard continues: “In their imaginary representation, the masses drift somewhere between passivity and wild spontaneity, but always as a potential energy.” Despite the inherently critical overtones of Thousands March toward concepts of representation, its questioning of concepts of political representation per se. Diáz Morales’s portrait of the masses is neither pessimistic nor dystopian; the artist does not only understand the masses—to pit Baudrillard against Baudrillard—“as a place of negativity or explosion, of the “absorption and implosion” of representation. Rather, Thousands March is also a cinematic ode to the power of collective action, to the possibility, indeed the necessity, of intervention, of rebellion, of resistance. The film can thus be read as a portrait of a perpetual protest without beginning or end, one that is, however, ultimately traceable to the fundamental impulse—indeed to the principle—of freedom itself.

Diáz Morales’s second filmic work is also based on a simple, quasi-tactile and bodily element. Sinécdoque de una crisis shows a close-up of the hand of a former Argentinian president during his inauguration. In this hour-long film of political staging, the representative is seen repeatedly shaking hands with other personalities, politicians, and celebrities. In his filmic reworking of the historical footage, Diáz Morales focuses exclusively on the president’s hand, tracking and positioning it in the center of the frame so that all gestures, both affirmative and amicably intimate, define the action. Diáz Morales seems to be literally following the hand and its role in the proceedings. He lies in wait for it, following it to the edge of the frame, as it reaches for a handkerchief, brushes against a pant leg, extends outward again to meet the next opponent. Revealed here, in reversal but also in relation to the topos of the crowd—the formation of the masses in Thousands March—is a deeply physical and primal scenario, which quickly takes on power-theoretical undertones. One is confronted, again with Baudrillard, with a perpetual “system [that] continues under the same manifold signs but where these no longer represent anything.” In focusing on the hand, Diáz Morales draws attention to a medium of non-verbal and subliminal communication, to moments of acquiescence, trust, but also of domination. The length of the ritual not only renders it seemingly absurd, the unintended intimacy also gives it a latently oppressive and grotesque quality.

What initially appears in Sinécdoque de una crisis to be a media-staged ritual of political consensus, the transfer of political authority to one person, as one hand reveals, is with Diáz Morales also a tacit anticipation of the imminent economic collapse unleashed by that president two years after his inauguration. The film is thus a symbol for the state of perpetual economic crisis that the country finds itself in. It not only depicts the excessive, empty nature of political staging and representation, but can also be read metaphorically as a choreography of failure, the recurring disappointment of misplaced trust and projected hope. It is no coincidence that the artist has the filmic image—presented to the viewer on a small, square, publicly viewable LED screen at eye level—rotate on its own axis over the course of an hour, thus transforming it metaphorically into an intuitive timepiece, a clock that one can orient oneself by, even rely on.

Both films in the Miles marchan exhibition depict a calm, yet steady flowing continuum of movement. Both the shaking of hands and the slow movement of the protest crowds produce a kind of unsettling fascination. The movement is not only grounded in the filmic events; it seems to occur of its own accord, indeed to form an abstract, a priori entity. Despite editing and perspectival shifts, there is a constant drifting, directing, and insistence inherent to the events. Movement and direction—ultimately simple, kinetic, even physical elements—are the true tenor and defining aesthetic agents of the films. The essential nature of crowds, which actually exists conceptually outside the frame in both of Diaz Morales’s films, nevertheless finds a tangible counterpart in this movement, this flow, a sensuous, overtly processual, experiential form.

 
Text: David Komary
Translation: Erik Smith
 
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Sebastián Díaz Morales

sebastiandiazmorales.com
carliergebauer.com

Sebastián Díaz Morales was born in Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina, in 1975 and lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He attended the Universidad del Cine de Antin in Argentina from 1993-1999, the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam from 2000-2001, and Le Fresnoy, Roubaix, France from 2003-2004. Diaz Morales’s conception of reality has been shaped by the living conditions and landscape of his birthplace, Comodoro Rivadivia, an industrial city located on the Atlantic coast, in a rugged area between the Atlantic Ocean and the Patagonian Desert in southern Argentina. His questioning of reality in film, whether concerning landscape, the urban, or even the sociopolitical, has been marked from the very outset by a fundamental distrust of the belief in a single, unified reality. With Díaz Morales, the camera does not function as a medium for faithfully depicting and recording what is observed, but is an essential, even epistemic means for questioning and appropriating reality.

His work has been exhibited widely at venues—such as the Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou; Stedelijk Museum and De Appel, Amsterdam; Le Fresnoy, Roubaix; CAC, Vilnius; Art in General, New York City; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Biennale Sao Pablo; Biennale of Sydney; Miro Foundation, Barcelona; MUDAM, Luxemburg; Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; the Biennale di Venezia and Documenta Fifteen. 

His works can be found at the collections of the Centre Pompidou; Tate Modern; Fundación Jumex, Mexico; Sandretto Foundation, Torino; Lemaître's collection; Constantini collection, Buenos Aires; Pinault Foundation, Paris; Sammlung-Goetz, Munich; and the Fundacion de Arte Moderna, Museo Berardo, Lisbon between others. 
In 2009 he was awarded with a Guggenheim Fellowship.


Solo Exhibitions 

2024
Pasajes IV, Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, DK

2023
Bienalsur, Les Abatoirs, Toulouse, FR
Smashing Monuments, Kunsthall 3,14, Bergen, Norway
Smashing Monuments, Collective, Edinburgh, Scotland

2022
Miles Marchan (Thousands March), De Pont, Tilburg
Pasajes, carlier | gebauer, Madrid

2021
Suspension, Kunsthal, Gent, Belgium
Pasajes, Cityscapes Foundation, Oudezijds Voorburgwal, Amsterdam, NL
Open Sketches, Van Zijll Langhout Contemporary Art, Amsterdam, NL

2020
Talk with Dust, carlier|gebauer, Berlin

2019
Talk with Dust, STUK, Leuven, Belgium
The Lost Object, Statenlokaal Tweede Kamer, Den Haag, NL
Insight, Rotterdam Art Fest. & Art Rotterdam, Rotterdam, CS
The Lost Object, Statenlokaal Tweede Kamer, Den Haag, NL

2018
En un futuro no muy lejano, Muntref, Ecoparque, BsAs, Argentina
Passages, Galerie Stadtpark, Krems, Austria


2017
Solo Show, Ikono TV, Berlin, NY, Shanghai
The Man with the Bag & Canto Ostinato, Museum Kranenburgh, Bergen, NL
Compilation of works, Caixa Forum, Madrid, Spain
Insight, Solo presentation Feria Arco, Madrid, Spain

2016
Ficcionario IV, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Germany
The Lost Object, gallery carlier | gebauer, Berlin, Germany
Suspension and Pasajes IV, Statenlokaal Tweede Kamer, Den Haag, NL

2015
Pasajes, Galeria Pepe Cobo, Lima, Peru
Ficcionario III, Le Fresnoy, Roubaix, France

2014
Ficcionario II, CAC, Vilnius, Lithuania

2013
Ficcionario, gallery Catherine Bastide, Brussels
Social Sciences school, Paris (screening)
Double Feature, Schirn, Frankfurt (screening)
Something you should know, Social Sciences school, Paris (screening)

2012
Ficcionario, carlier | gebauer, Berlin
On Cinema and Representation, Videodromo, Ancona, Italy

2011
Solo presentation Open Space, Art Cologne, Germany
Sebastián Diaz Morales, Artsphere gallery, Jakarta, Indonesia
Seance Speciales #2, Frac Franche-Compte, Besançon, France

2010
Perspectif Cinema (screening), Centre Pompidou, Paris
El Camino entre dos puntos, Pepe Cobo y cia, Madrid
Natalie Seroussi Galerie, Paris

2009
The Way Between Two Points, carlier | gebauer, Berlin
The Way between Two Points, Frieze fair, London

2008
Fine Art School Grand Galleries, Rouen, France

2007
The Means of Illusion, carlier | gebauer, Berlin
Ring, Art/Unlimited, Basel, Switzerland

2006
The Man with the Bag, Miro Foundation, Espai 13, Barcelona, Spain

2005
Dependents, Attitudes, Geneve, Switzerland.
Prototypes, carlier | gebauer, Berlin.
Lucharemos..., Yvon Lambert, Le Studio, Paris.
Nowhere, Le Plateau, Paris.

2004
The Enigmatic Visitor and The Man with the Bag, Kunst Werke, Berlin.
15000000 Parachutes, Tate Modern,The Projected Image, Collection Display, London.

2003
In a not so Distant Future, Stedelijk Bureau, Amsterdam, NL
Compilation works, MK2, Paris, France
Operacion Rescate (screening program), Compilation works, MAMBA Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires
In Focus Compilation Video Works 1997-2002, World Wide Video Festival, Amsterdam, NL
The Apocalyptic Man and One Year Later, Croix Baragnon, Traverse Video, Toulouse, France
The Apocalyptic Man, Buro Empty, Amsterdam, NL

2002
The Apocalyptic Man, gallery carlier | gebauer, Berlin
The Persecution of the White Car, FIAC, Video Cube, Price Winner, Paris
Blikwissel, De Paraplue-Fabriek, Nijmegen, NL
Just Like a That Productions, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach,Germany

2001
Open Circuit, n.s.a. Gallery, Durban, South Africa, (in collaboration with Jo Ractliffe)
   
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