Proposal nothing to hide

NOTHING TO HIDE: A feminine landscape of 10 contemporary Latin American artists.Curated by Manuel Viera-Gallo & Monika Bravo

Silvina Arismendi/ Uruguay, Monika Bravo/ Colombia, Tania Candiani / Mexico, Carolina Caycedo / Colombia, Voluspa Jarpa / Chile, Mari Juliano / Brazil, Regina Jose Galindo / Guatemala, Milagros de la Torre / Peru, Cecilia Vicuna / Chile, Manuela Viera-Gallo / Chile.

A proposal for 10 artworks by renown Latin American artists, two of which have been invited to represent national Pavilions at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, the others are mid-career and an emerging artists. These women reflect from their feminine per-spective on their social landscape based on a contemporary society that sinks its roots in the ancestral cultures that to the day still survives in rituals, beliefs and traditions.

The proposed works point to an orphan-hood in a society dismantled of sense, a society that is contradictory and fraught with violence. Revealing the failure of co-lonialism and its illusion of eliminating diversity by forcing the assimilation of a corrupted, complex identity that is difficult to decipher and to be represented. This group embodies a continent that wants to speak its own voice, so loudly and openly by building their own visual discourse. It is a social instinct shaking in various ways Latin America’s communities, a cry of a society in turmoil that aims to overcome social exclusion and discrimination. They channel the voice of immigrants, young girls with no future in the horizon, the lamentation of the Indigenous people liv-ing between the asphalt and the vertigo.

Therefore the works of these artists as-sume a melancholy and poetic weight while remaining direct and frontal in its decry. Delving into the secret female perception, into the primitive mystery of Mother Earth, containing a series of layers of meaning and readings. They evoke the waterfalls and

deep waters coming down as rivers from the snowy mountains, conjuring the fatigue of their people to leave a mark in the high moors and endless deserts of loneliness and desolation of our society. In the cur-rent Latin American capitals, millions of people are concentrated living inorganical-ly in structures lacking any urban planning, transforming a female energy within as a survival tool that is used in the constant disappointment of its capitalist system.

The proposal seeks to question the vis-itor to read and decode this social X-ray: first the acceptance of “that what is” - that crude reality- confronted with the utopia of a discovered continent, a continent that wants its own identity. It reveals the pain and abandonment, the long and arduous road towards healing from acceptance and recognition to a future with more possibili-ties of integration. Balancing both energies of surrendering and action, for there is power in the surrendering and acceptance of the conditions, is the first step towards a healing, a powerful tool for transformation, and the art of these women from fiery lands builds a vital aesthetic discourse that is in-serted fully in the contemporary discourse.

We have nothing to hide, nothing to hide

Manuela Viera-Gallo & Monika Bravo

Nothing to hide: The feminine landscape of 10 contemporary Latin American artists.

Silvina Arismendi 1976 in Montevideo, Uruguay, lives and works in NY

My latest body of work is the result of an unrelenting research of materials and supplies. In an almost casual and brief gesture, I transform myriad of objects, gathered from everyday life, and compile them into different arrangements. I attempt to give order by measuring my time, my work and my possibil-ities with certain materials and objects - obsessive repetition provides coined systems unique to me alone. The work reveals in itself the process of its making, its failure or triumph.

I face every work with curiosity and try to understand how i can modify the least to achieve the most. how can i start to get some sort of inner logic to my process that might lead the viewer to apparent conclusions and hopefully to a lot of confusion.

I like to think of my work as an organized world that welcomes chaos and embraces the power of sim-plicity

Silvina Arismendi was born in 1976 in Montevideo, Uruguay. In 2000, she received a scholarship to study in the Czech Republic, graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2007. Since 2003, she has exhibited in many European cities, as well as in Latin America. In 2007 she founded galería parásito/, which is a platform for for the cultural exchange between Latin America and Central and Eastern Eu-rope.


MONIKA BRAVO Bogotá, Colombia in 1964, lives and works in NY

A multi-disciplinary artist. Bravo examines the notion of perception by questioning whether the world we live in, is but a mental construction; her artistic practice is used as a tool to decipher the laws that govern the world, she is interested in coding/decoding information, also interested in the language of abstraction and an ongoing pursuit to decipher reality by means of perception. She creates objects and enviroments by incorporating still, moving images, sound and interactivity to generate situations where she materializes and communicates her emotional Landscape. She challenges the audience’s own perception of what they consider real by generating a platform where they are induced to connect by exploring, interacting and at times by focusing on an object-place-scene for a duration of time in a manner that is both meditative and investigative.

In 2015, she will be representing the Vatican Pavillion at the The 56th International Art Exhibition Venice Biennale, upcoming exhibitions also include “Waterweavers: The River in Contemporary....”, curated by Jose Roca at Centro Conde Duque, Madrid 2015 and Teorema, curated by Octavio Zaya at Mana Contem-porary in NJ, a solo show ay Y Gallery in NYC, she was recently nominated for the EFGBank & ArtNexus Acquisition Prize ArteBa 2014. Recent solo shows: URUMU, curated by Beatriz Lopez, NC-arte, Bogota. LABORATORIUM curated by Jose Roca. Soloproject, ArtBO2013, Museum of Art, Montclair. NJ and BYU Museum of Art, Provo, UTAH. Other venues include Sternesen Museum, Oslo, Museo Banco de la Re-publica, Bogota, Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Seoul International Biennial of New Media Art, SITE Santa Fe; Centro de Arte Contemporaneo Caja de Burgos, Spain, Museo del Barrio, New Museum in NY. Her videos have been screened at MOMA, Anthology Film Archives, Brooklyn Museum, New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Kitchen, MACRO Roma, NY video festival Lincoln Center & Americas Society in NY, L.A MOCA, Tate Britain & Museo Reina Sofia. Attended LMCC’s WTC World Views, the Santa Fe Art Institute & 2003 ART OMI Artist-in-Residency Programs. Her work has been reviewed by The New York Times, Art Nexus, Art in America, The New Yorker among others. She has been granted numerous public commissions, including Landmarks Public Art Program at the University of Texas at Austin. also by Public Art for Public Schools at New York City School Construction Authority. BREATHING_WALL a 58 monitor video strip commissioned by Los Angeles World Airports for the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX, for the COMCAST headquarters in Philadelphia and the Peninsula Hotel Hong Kong among many more.


Monika Bravo’s URUMU [WEAVING_TIME] is a video installation that rapidly envelops the viewer in tex-tile. Intermittently, across three walls (the entirety of the viewer’s field of perception), “threads” shoot up and down creating a virtual warp. At the same time and with the same irregular rhythm, weft “threads” move left and right, creating a weave. The resulting graphic “woven” image appears to constitute a text written in an unknown foreign language. As the weaving process continues, the graphic image of the pattern slowly fades into a video that at the end reveals a view of an undetermined location, seemingly devoid of the faces of human beings.

The meaning of the virtual weavings will vary depending on the viewer. For people who grew up outside of Colombia, they might seem like abstract patterns, possibly recalling the graphic motifs of an indigenous South American culture. For Colombians, they will evoke mochilas arhuacas, the Arhuaco bags which are ubiquitous throughout the country and are also popular tourist souvenir. For the Arhuaco (Ika) people who inhabit the Sierra Nevada de santa Marta region, however, the motifs have a very specific meaning, each element symbolizing a fundamental idea about their culture. As one member of this indigenous community has stated, “the universe that shelters us is a spiral dwells in the bottom of my backpack. The threats of my knowledge comes from before, and have been intertwining since I was a girl.” In the area in which they live, which they share with the Wiwa and Kogi peoples, as stunning mountain range that forms a distinct geographic border adjacent to the Caribbean Sea, textiles are both practical and symbolically significant. The communities of the Sierra Nevada, despite their tense and tenuous dia-logue with the modern world, have been able to preserve their ancient rituals and traditions that rely on other ways of relating to nature. LINK TO VIDEO:

http://monikabravo.com/WEAVING_TIME


Studies for URUMU_Weaving_Time. 2014, Both studies in glass and paper are drawings that dwell in a threshold between geometry and meaning. These diagrams originate from ancestral cultures and conform textile sequences with embedded information that it is meant to be passed along between generations. Their vivid colors are taken from Sonia Delauney’s (1885-1979) gamme de couleur used in her work during the course of her career.


Tania Candiani, Mexico City, 1974

Her research processes take as starting point language, text, the political implications of the domestic, of what is public and private, and of “the others.” Translate strategies amongst systems –linguistic, visual, phonic– and practices, generates equivalences and associations, where there is a constant nos-talgia for the obsolete, that makes her consider the discursive content of artifacts and on the former projections of future. In this quest, she has gathered interdisciplinary work teams that contribute from their diverse knowledge fields and specific skills to archive poetic intersections amongst art and tech-nology.

Textiles have been present in her work as tailoring, as a narrative resource and as labor, socially em-bedded with meaning. Tailoring as design is a contact point with architecture, where the space distribu-tion of the plans as sewing patterns re-signifying the idea of inhabited space or the utopia of an space that could be inhabited. Her creative processes continue linked with language, and her intention is increasingly oriented to-wards the materiality of sound, the idea of the automaton, the possibilities of mechanisms and the sensible experience with architecture. ----Tania Candiani will represent Mexico’s Pavillion at the 56th venice Biennial in 2015, she is a Guggen-heim scholarship fellow in the Creative Arts category and she is part of the Mexican National System of Creators since 2012.


Tania Candianiposible work

La magdalenavideo 2013

Perspectografos2013Perspectógrafos is a couple of exercises that reflect on the empirical gaze and its contraposition to the scientific one. In a piece of this body of work, Candiani recreates the old draftsman’s ‘machine’, formed by two squared wooden reticles, –which are aimed to section a landscape and calculate perspective– to observe the horizon at River Magdalena in Honda, Tolima. Another piece uses a kaleidoscopic projector to process –in a mind-boggling way–, images of leaves and endemic plants from this Colombian town.

In both pieces of work, Candiani questions the ways to investigate and leave record of discoveries about a barely known place, and confronts the scientific method with local habits.


Carolina Caycedo engages with issues and contexts that affect a broad public on an everyday level: in her work, art functions as a pretext for offering up utopian models to inhabit a world in which individ-uals and communities are increasingly subject to com-modification, exploitation, and discrimination. Much of Caycedo’s work is enacted and exists solely in public space as a form of urban intervention.

Caycedo’s complicated biography has inevitably influenced the content of her work — she was born in the UK, grew up in Colombia, and started a family in Puerto Rico, before residing in multiple cities in Europe and the US. But rather than employ apolitical terms like »nomadic« or »globetrotting«, the art-ist refers to herself as an immigrant, in order to emphasize the fact that uninhibited travel has become possible only for a relatively small elite, and that even as a part of this elite, most artists live under precarious economic conditions.

Her work has been exhibited widely in venues such as Foundation Cartier and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris; Iniva in London; Creative Time, New Museum, Queens Museum, Ford Foundation and Apex Art in New York; Serralves Museum in Porto and Museu da Cidade in Lisbon; House of World Cultures and NGBK in Berlin; Secession in Vienna, Steirischer Herbst in Graz and Lentos Kuntshalle in Linz; Moderna Galerija in Slovenia; MUSAC in Leon, Santa Monica Art Center in Barcelona, and Casa Encendida and Matadero in Madrid; Wattis Institute in San Francisco; LACE and 18th Street Art Center in Los Angeles; Teorética in San José; Alianza Francesa, Espacio La Rebeca and Galería Santa Fé in Bogotá. She has participated in the 2010 Pontevedra Biennial, 2009 Havana Biennial, 2009 San Juan Poligraphic Triennial, 2006 Whitney Biennial, 2003 Venice Biennial, 2002 Young Art Biennial in Turin, and 2001 Istanbul Biennial.


Carolina Caycedo

Possible work:

OFFERINGS, 2011.Urban Intervention.1000 screen printed candles / 12 designs and printed program booklets / 16 pages.

A collaboration with members of local religious, spiritual, and social activist groups living and working in the Lower East Side resulted in Offerings, a multi-faceted project that moves fluid-ly across belief systems and evokes illumination as a universal metaphor for transcendence. Working with hundreds of screen-printed glass votive candles as a medium and form that can be both customized and easily distributed, a series of 2 spiritually inclusive public shrines and candlelight ceremonies were designed to take place over the course of a weekend.


Voluspa Jarpa (born in 1971 in Rancagua, Chile).

She lives and works in Santiago, Chile. Her work is based upon a meticulous analysis of political, his-torical and social documents from Chile and other Latin American countries that she uses to develop a reflection on the concept of memory, and explore many facets of the cultural notion of trauma. Her work might be seen as a subtle and covert examination of History. She has participated in many interna-tional exhibitions including: Dislocacion at the Kunst Museum of Bern, Swirzerland (2009); La No-His-toria, 8th Biennial of Mercosur, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2011), La Biblioteca de la No-Historia at the 12th Biennial of Istanbul, Turkey (2011), Zona Maco Sur, mor.charpentier, Mexico City, Mexico (2013), and the Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2014). She received the illy sustainArt Prize in 2012 during ARCO in Madrid, Spain, and she was shortlisted for the Prix Meurice pour l’Art Contemporain in 2014.


Voluspa Jarpa

POSSIBLE WORK

MINIMAL SECRET, SOUTH AMERICA 2013Installation, acrilic, laser cutVariable dimension

BIBLIOTECA DE LA NO – HISTORIA 2011-2012Books, different types and formats, forms, shelves and various displays. Variable dimensions.


MARIANA JULIANO ( born 1983, Sao Pablo)Brazilian photographer, live and work in Bushwick New York.

From the last 8 year she travels around the world, with her 4x 5 camera and photographs strangers in the street. She shoots for her pootraits only once, doing the reflection of the camera as a weapon. She collects over 300 portraits of strangers.

Her point of view is from a minority of our society; she is an immigrant, a lesbian, and an artist. She is a young and experimental but with a strong view of her new generation, she has the power of under-standing the land of no identities, of sexual minorities and now in her new series she works with the edge of death.

The interest of her new series “I want to be Dutch” is the obsession of this Brazilian artist of doing in Photography what the Dutch did with painting. With a strong sense of humor, and an extraordinary technique this photographer, decides to live her own investigation, killing the animals that she shoots, and living with them in the studio, experiencing every stage of the still life, that she creates.

“I see this series as a portrait of our society.” mari juliano


MARIANA JULIANO

Possible work

4 X 5 STRANGERSPORTRAITS .

A series of 5 Tranvesti from Bushwick New York.

I want to be Dutch .


REGINA JOSÉ GALINDO (born 1974 Guatemala)

Lives and works in Guatemala.

Performance artist who specializes in body art. Since she was invited by Harald Szeemann to the 49th Venice Biennale with the work El dolor en un panuelo and made on the occasion the perfor-mance Piel, Regina José Galindo has presented her work in numerous international exhibitions.

Awarded the Golden Lion for best under 35 artist two editions later for Himenoplastia, in the 51st Venice Biennale where she also presented Golpes and ¿Quién puede borrar las huellas?, Galindo has also participated in the Prague and Tirane biennials, as well as in major international insti-tutions such as PS1 in New York and Le Plateau in Paris. Her work is also present in important private and public collections, such as the Museo Rivoli in Torino, or the Miami Art Museum and Cisneros Fontanals Collection in Miami. Pompidou. Essex. Pricenton Universtity. Meiac, España. Fondazione Teseco. Pisa, Italia. Fondazione Galleria Civica, Trento, Italia. MMKA, Budapest, Hun-gary. Consejeria de Murcia, España. Fundación Mallorca, España. Museo de Rivoli Torino, Italia. Fundación Daros, Suiza. Blanton Museum,Texas. Colección La Gaia. UBS Art Collection. Miami Art Museum. Cisneros Fountanal. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Costa Rica, MADCO.


REGINA JOSÉ GALINDO

POSSIBLE WORK

BIG BANG 2014

Video Performance in Museum of fine Arts Boston In June 2009, the automobile industry giant General Motors filed for bankruptcy amidst the market crash already taking effect in the United States. The fall of this transnational corporation deepened the financial collapse in the US and beyond, with the majority of its plants and employees residing abroad. For Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo, economic globalization ensures that “the origin of the crisis for some…is the origin of the crisis for all.” Staged 5 years following “the end of an era” for the US automobile industry, Galindo’s performance Big Bang (2014) addresses the increasingly interconnected dynamics of our global age.

MARABUNTA 2011Caribbean AntsUno se imagina el mar caribe Como un hormiguero que devora las antillas.- Homero Pumarol

Acción que consistió en el desmantelamiento total de un automóvil, en la vía pública y con el conductor dentro. Un equipo de 21 hombres se acercan a mi cuando estaciono y empiezan a desmantelar el auto, pieza por pieza, hasta desaparecerlo por completo.


Milagros de la Torre, Lima Peru, lives and works in NY.

Milagros de la Torre is an influential Latin American contemporary artist and photographer. She stud-ied Communication Sciences at the University of Lima and received a B.A. (Hons) in Photography from the London College of Printing. Her first solo exhibition was presented at the Palais de Tokyo, Centre National de la Photographie, Paris, as part of the Under the Black Sun project. She received the Rocke-feller Foundation Artist Grant in 1995 and was awarded the Romeo Martinez Photography Prize and the Young Iberoamerican Creators Prize for her series The Lost Steps. She received the Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts, Photography in 2011.

Her photographs emerge from a rigorous research process, critical argumentation of the photographic apparatus, and an intensely personal background. By means of a sober and austere focus, her images often project an eerie beauty and visual seduction that contrasts with the painful subject matter. In-habited by criminal worlds, red-faced portrait negatives, everyday objects with intense psychological charge, troubling interior dialogues, apparently innocent clothing, omitted presences, cancelled gazes, these works offer analyses of human actions during fraught situations through a distinctive photo-graphic language. Her work is part of private and public collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, Massa-chusetts; Yale University, New York; F.N.A.C., Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Essex Collection of Art from Latin America, Col-chester, U.K.; Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina among others. An important monograph, which will gather some of her most striking and compelling work, designed by Toluca Editions, will be published by RM Editorial, Mexico/Barcelona, in 2012, with text by Marta Gili, Director of the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris. De la Torre now lives and works in


Milagros de la Torre

Possible works

“Shirt of journalist murdered in the Uchuraccay Massacre, Ayacucho”. 1996, Toned gelatin silver print, 16 x 16 inFrom de serieThe Lost Steps (Los Pasos Perdidos),


CECILIA VICUÑA born 1947 Chilean poet, artist, filmmaker and political activist

Poet and artist, born in Chile, she performs and exhibits her work widely in Europe, Latin America and the US. She is also a political activist and founding member of Artists for Democracy. Since l980 she lives in New York and Chile.

She has been creating “precarious works”, ephemeral installations in nature, cities and museums since l966, as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard.” She lectures and teaches work-shops and seminars, for indigenous communities, and universities, such as Naropa University, Denver University, SUNY Purchase and Universidad de Buenos Aires. She recently completed a performance tour of four Latin American countries, along with the American poet Jerome Rothenberg.

Her visual work has been exihibited at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago, The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and The Whitecahel Art Gallery in London, and at The Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), in New York, among many others.The author of 16 books, her poetry has been translated into several languages.


CECILIA VICUÑA

POSSIBLE WORKPREFORMANCE VASO DE LECHE

“Water Writing” nicely demonstrates the range of Vicuña’s work—from colorful portraits to prints of famous performances (like Vaso de Leche/Glass of Milk which protested the death of children in Bogota from contaminated milk) to bilingual visual poems drawn on the gallery walls.

precarios of the 60’s, ARE THE MOST INTERESTING HISTORICAL PIECES

PORTRAITThe portraits include a wonderful self-portrait that cleverly plays upon the artist’s name as well as homages to important Chilean women like Gabriela Mistral and Violeta Parra


Manuela Viera-Gallo ( born in Rome 1977),

Chilean artist living in Brookling NY. Born during her parents exile in Rome, Italy, my point of view has been strongly shaped by the social and political violence that has affected the history of most Latin American countries and by a constant state of Migration. As a consequence her work engages preoc-cupations, anxieties and fears derived from her own experience. Her artistic practice presents a mul-tidisciplinary body of work that departs from absurdity to manipulate and distort known symbols and imagery into an allegorical, fantastical and darkly comical frame work that allows me to take ownership of the subsequent transformation to analyze different processes of political and social instability.

Viera-Gallo have been showing internationally, having solo show at La Central Gallery, Bogota, Colom-bia (2013), Aninat Gallery, Santiago, Chile (2013), Y Gallery, New York. USA (2010), Valenzuela & Klenner Foundation, Bogota, Colombia (2007), Broadway 1602 Gallery, New York, USA (2007), Die Ecke Gallery, Santiago, Chile (2006; Rebecca Container Gallery, Genova, Italy (2005); 24/7 Gallery, East End London, UK (2002.

She has participated in several group shows at Mueso del Barrio, Art Museum of the Americas, 10th Biennale of video and media Arts of Chile, CIF, Camdem International Film Festival, Asymmetrick Arts Center, Chelsea Art Museum, East Asia Contemporary Museum or 5th Biennial do Mercosur, among others.I,n 2015 she will represent chile in Bienal de la fronteras, and she will do Unlimited Residency for 6 months in NYC.


Manuela Viera-GalloPssible works

Sisifa. 2014Drawing with Sawdust on paper 300 x 250 cms

DOMESTIC VIOLENCECotton rope, broken ceramic plates.Variable dimensions



Documents

Proposal nothing to hide