Five Gestures is the first exhibition of Sergio Torres-Torres at Sixteen:One Gallery. It is composed of three parts: a video projection, a wall painting, and a three-dimensional object made up of five paintings. These three parts are inter-related and add to a larger project Torres-Torres has been working on since 2003 called The Banner Project. Banner Project: Part One took up the history of social protest, focusing on the Russian Revolution of October 1917.

In its entirety, Five Gestures questions the way in which images of social protest are mediated by contemporary culture. Just as the meaning of an utterance shifts as it is transcribed, the meaning of our gestures become vulnerable to implied, pre-determined notions when they are photographed or video-taped and represented in the public sphere. Depleted of their original stigma, the mediated images that Torres-Torres references take up the current dilemma individual citizens have when they are asked what it means to be a political subject. Five Gestures depicts the subject who protests in a designated march, acting in the present tense, but is aware of their body/image as a symbol, and finally as a historicized image.

Five Gestures uses personal video footage taken from the heavily attended pro-immigration marches on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles on May 1, 2006. Each of the five paintings uses a different frame taken from his footage, presenting us with a serial depiction of a single moment of that social event. The iconic images of social protest that Torres-Torres chose are graphically rendered, silhouetted groups of demonstrators in different stages of building a “human pyramid.” Isolating the documentation of this “gesture,” a temporary monument in itself, Torres-Torres reveals that social acts of protest, wholly dependent upon the body, defy the incentive of the individual or social voice of dissent. Separating an utterance, or voice, from the individual or from a group of demonstrators for that matter, points to the crux of the problem with mediated acts of protest. It is a paradox that Torres-Torres tries to unravel by taking up a critical position. Rather than making the gestures into a monument, or anti-monument, he explores the impossibility of retaining a voice of dissent in a globalize world where labor is open to the world stage, no longer limited to the confines of national borders, much less those of the modern era’s split between labor unions and industrial capitalists.