Appropriation, storytelling, reenactment, and reportage are some of the strategies that Mario García Torres deploys to highlight the limitations of factual evidence and the agency of historical records and objects. An Arrival Tale detaches the Mexican artist’s works in the TBA21 collection from their original contexts and offers them as a collection of narratives and artistic experiments open for reinscription in order to address the conditions and urgencies of our contemporary societies. It examines the space of arrival as a complicated and disjointed nexus between departure, displacement, and return.

This publication follows the eponymous exhibition at TBA21 – Augarten. While conceived in relation to the exhibition, this book is not a documentation, but rather the start of a journey that expands, explores, complicates, and undoes the thematic threads of spatial disjunction, recollection, asynchronicity, fictionality, and the politics of visibility.