Installation and performance where the artist allows the visitor a one dollar payment in exchange for three minutes of intimacy or sexuality live. Hundreds of people go by the artist's body. A critical exercise and denouncement with the artist's life itself, son of a prostitute and gestated with a prostitution relationship as a backdrop.
Empathy and Prostitution is an artistic piece designed, developed and performatized by artist Abel Azcona in the cities of Bogota, Madrid and Houston. Three clearly differentiated cycles, carried out in Colombia, Spain and the United States during the years 2013 and 2014. The first cycle of the project was conceived and carried out at the Santa Fé Gallery in Bogotá, in February 2013. The second cycle in Madrid by the hand of the Factoría de Arte y Desarrollo Gallery on the occasion of Room Art Fair Madrid. On this occasion Empathy and Prostitution was held there two consecutive days in the month of November 2013. The third and last stage of the piece was held in February 2014 as the inaugural piece of the Houston International Performance Art Biennale, United States.
The documentation, the file and the physical facilities of each of the three stages of Empathy and Prostitution, throughout 2013, 2014 and 2015 generated different exhibitions and facilities in cities such as Pamplona, Madrid, Paris, Tirana, Bogotá, Ciudad de Mexico, New York or Houston. The photographic result was one of the protagonists at the international Art Is Hope event in Paris, with the work of the artist Abel Azcona exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in 2013, at PIASA in 2015 and at the Galerie Perrotin in 2016. Also Empathy and Prostitution was the image of the Queer International Arts Festival in New York in 2014 and exhibited at Leslie Lohman Museum where it is part of the permanent collection. The same year it was part of a charity exhibition in New York and subsequent auction at Paddle8 with artists such as Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin or Louise Bourgeois. At Tulla Center in Tirana, the project was exhibited with the artist's participation in the installation, an exhibition with great affluence and some controversy in the capital of Albania. The completed project, consisting of photographs, videos and installations, formed part of the retrospective exhibition dedicated to the artist in Pamplona in 2015 and in the two retrospective exhibitions La Línea de Tu Espalda en Museari, Museu del Imaginari and La Extinción del Deseo en to sexual-themed projects at La Juan Gallery in Madrid in 2017.
