“Chosen Memories: Contemporary Artistic Interpretations of Latin America’s Colonial Past”

AFP, published on Tuesday, May 02, 2023 at 5:45 p.m.

In New York, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) offers a new reading of Latin America’s colonial past through the eyes of contemporary artists.

A total of 65 works by 40 artists of different generations and styles reinterpret the region’s history told by cartographers, missionaries, scientists and adventurers.

Through painting, photography, sculpture or video, the exhibition “Chosen Memories”, until September 9, is part of the collection of the Venezuelan Patricia Phelps de Cisneros who donated it to the museum of New York.

Articulated around three themes, the artists offer new “readings of the history” of European colonialism in Latin America and the revitalization of its cultural heritage, according to the MoMA.

Thus with “Looting”, the Guatemalan Regina José Galindo created a work with the gold encrustations that a dentist placed in his molars and which, after extracting them again, remained like “imprints of his mouth that function like small sculptures of an imaginary archaeological museum”, in a metaphor for the violence of the economies of extraction of raw materials.

“Terra Nova”, the name of a map published in Europe in 1541, serves as the basis for the Dominican Firelei Báez to paint a ciguapa, a mythological female creature from her country, voluptuous and elusive which, juxtaposed with the diagram of the map, “incarnates fears and desires of European conquerors” to unknown cultures.

Argentinian Leandro Katz used early lithographs made in the 1830s by explorers John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, who studied the Maya region that now occupies southern Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, to reconstruct their shipments.

Under the artistic name “Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis”, the Chileans Pedro Mardones Lemebel, a writer, and the poet Francisco Casas present their version of “Las dos Fridas” in an impressive photograph, alluding to the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907- 1954).

– “History is a living organism” –

The artists delved “into the past in order to repair histories of dispossession, reconnect with undervalued cultural legacies, and strengthen ties of kinship and belonging,” the Latin art curator said in a statement. -American of the museum, Argentina Inés Katzenstein.

“For example,” she added to AFP, “the works offer a critical look at European colonialism.”

For the Brazilian photographer Rosangela Rennó, quoted by the MoMA, “History is a living organism (…) constantly re-read and re-evaluated”.

For the organizers of “Chosen Memories”, colonial structures continue to condition value systems around ancestral cultures, work and nature.

Because the “past is never completely past” and “is a fertile field of possibilities for the present”.

Some of what is on display at MoMA comes from the collection of Mrs. Phelps de Cisneros who donated 250 works to the museum for 25 years. In 2016, this Venezuelan, one of the biggest private collectors in the world, created an eponymous research institute dedicated to Latin American art.

The MoMa has more than 5,000 works of modern and contemporary art from this region.

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