"Oscar Tuazon Builds Activist Prototypes" by Ramona Heinlein

Emanating from a small monitor at the centre of the gallery, the voices of Goshute Chairman Rupert Steele and Ely Shoshone elder Delaine Spilsbury form the conceptual backbone of Oscar Tuazon’s first solo exhibition in Austria, ‘Words for Water’. The conservationists speak about the massacres of their ancestors, their fight against the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s plans to pump groundwater from their native land, learning from ‘mother nature’ as our ‘original teacher’, and decentring human exceptionalism towards interconnectedness and respect. Their narrative sets the tone for a show whose engagement with water is inseparable from a deep sensibility towards Indigenous history and its relationship to nature.

The video is part of Cedar Spring Water School (2023), one of three architectural structures in the exhibition that function as stages for the audience to engage with socio-environmental issues, presented alongside a selection of sculptures and paintings. Steele and Spilsbury are collaborators in the Spring Valley iteration of Tuazon’s project ‘Water School’ (2016–ongoing), in which the artist builds permanent learning spaces across the US, raising awareness of the political battles around water. Cedar Spring is a prototype for a simple dome structure made from cardboard, plywood and tape. With its polygonal, cave-like architecture, the work has a raw, retro-futurist aesthetic.

A personal highlight are the construction’s powder-printed windows featuring delicate paintings of blue circles (Cedar Spring Circle and Scholar’s Circle, both 2023). When daylight streams gently through them, they add a touch of sacredness to the otherwise-DIY look of the piece. Tuazon manages to create a surprisingly warm, inviting atmosphere that is simultaneously undergirded by a fundamental sense of fragility due to the structure’s provisional nature.

Read full article at frieze.com