Armando Rosales-Rivero presents a body of work
made within the confines of Westwerk facilities. Overlaying research at Hamburg’s Tierpark Hagenbeck Zoo and Museum of Ethnology with his personal experience of being “in residence” at Westwerk, his
work explores ideas and tactics of artificial adaptation, de-naturalization, and temporal transplantation.

Using Karl Hagenbeck’s controversial “ethnological expositions”, or human zoos, as a troubling start-point, Rosales-Rivero places his physical self, his art practice, and his works into a condition of public observation. The exhibition consists of an array of sculptures that
mix materiality, image, sound, and being/presence, all of them working together to question how certain types of institutional languages function, and how certain narratives gain strength over time.

Rosales-Rivero’s work employs the conscious and
the intuitive as tools to probe the interweaved infra-structures of the intimate, the institutional, and the political. His sculptures and installations act as provocations, what-ifs, challenging the viewer to explore form and synthesis, to identify new ways of thinking through and with the mechanisms and substructures that shape our behaviour act in every given context, and to position the body itself as a
vehicle for learning.

Armando Rosales was born in Cabimas, Venezuela (1987).
Lives and works in Mexico City since 2015. He graduated from the University of Zulia with a bachelors in Graphic Design in 2010, later forming part of the Soma program’s class of 2016
in Mexico City, in 2019 was part of the Art and Law program hosted by Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento at AAP Cornell in NYC.
He was co-founder and co-director of the Contemporary Art Space Al Borde (2010–2014) in Maracaibo, which in 2012 obtained a two-year grant from the Fundación Cisneros/CPPC within its program to support cultural organizations. Rosales’s work has been exhibited internationally, he has been the recipient of several awards, recognitions, and grants among which stand out, 2017, with 10,000 as a curatorial project
the Patronato de Arte contemporáneo (PAC) in Mexico City.
At the start of his career in 2011, Rosales won an award from the International Association of Critics of Art (AICA) as an emerging artist.

His works are part of several collections, including:
The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (Venezuela, United States), C&FE Collection, Caracas, Venezuela. Museum of Contemporary Art of Zulia, Lía Bermúdez Art Center, ESPAC, and private collections. In recent years his  work has been shown in various institutions in México City, such as Espac,
El Museo del Chopo, and the Tamayo Museum with a couple
of installations com-missioned for the show Otrxs Mundxs curated by Humberto Moro in 2020, and the Anahuacalli Museum for the Sound+ Festival in 2021. He is currently a guest at the Westwerk as a scholarship holder for international cultural exchange.