Recent Art News
"The Disappeared" Opens in Guatemala |
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| Thursday, 29 May 2008 05:25 |
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GUATEMALA CITY - The Disappeared brings together the work of twenty-seven living artists from South America who, over the course of the last thirty years, have made art about los desaparecidos or the disappeared. These artists have lived through the horrors of the military dictatorships that rocked their countries in the mid-decades of the twentieth century. Some worked in the resistance; some had parents or siblings who were disappeared; others were forced into exile. The youngest were born into the aftermath of those dictatorships. And still others live in countries maimed by endless civil war. Disappearance was inevitably linked to torture. Laurel Reuter, curator of the exhibition and director of the North Dakota Museum of Art, was struck by the timelessness and truthfulness of the art. For example, when Identidad, a collaborative installation made by thirteen Argentinean artists, opened in Buenos Aires, three people discovered their long-hidden identities. They had been taken at birth from those who opposed the government and adopted into military families. Through their art, these artists fight amnesia in their own countries as a stay against such atrocities happening again. Artists in exhibition: Marcelo Brodsky, Luis Camnitzer, Arturo Dulcos, Juan Manuel Echavarría, Antonio Frasconi, Nicolas Guagnini, Sara Maneiro, Cildo Meireles, Oscar Muñoz, Ivan Navarro, Luis Gonzáles Palma, Ana Tiscornia and Fernando Traverso. Collaborative work by Argentinean artists Carlos Alonso, Nora Aslán, Mireya Baglietto, Remo Bianchedi, Diana Dowek, León Ferrari, Rosana Fuertes, Carlos Gorriarena, Adolfo Nigro, Luis Felipe Noé, Daniel Ontiveros, Juan Carlos Romero & Marcia Schvartz. In the long history of Colombia’s violence, massacres keep repeating, accompanied by mutilations of the corpses. These mutilations have been known as cortes or cuts. In the 1950s the cuts took place in the countryside in a war between conservative and liberal peasants. Among the many different cuts there was one named picadillo de tamal (tamal being a national dish and picadillo meaning minced). In this corte the body was cut into small pieces so the identification of the body was erased. Today the paramilitary forces in the countryside have continued these practices. In some massacres the stomach of the victim is cut open and disemboweled so the body when thrown into the river sinks to the bottom. Other corpses that are thrown into the rivers float and if the vultures do not eat them, the corpse that are rescued are buried under a cross written with the words NN (no name). —Juan Manuel Echavarría Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
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