Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America
If pressure to entice audiences to the MCA did not always rely upon snappy and eye-catching advertising (this show employed Vik Muniz’s portrait of Che Guevara drawn with the contents of a tin of black bean soup) then I would have plumped for the artist Rosângela Rennó and her Untitled (America) 1998. Not only does the photographic diptych conjure up the mystery, paradox and disturbing writings of Jorge Luis Borges (from whom the title ‘The Hours’ is derived) but it encapsulates dispossession, poverty, authoritarian perversity and the human urge to mark personal and national identity. It also points to the ravages of time and the retrieval of history that is so important for countries that have been colonised. It is these qualities that come through in practically all of the one hundred and thirty works (by thirty artists) in this major event.
‘The Hours’ is the most comprehensive exhibition of Latin American art shown in Australia and comes courtesy of the Daros-Latinamerica Collection in Zürich. Staged by IMMA (the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin) during 2005-06, this selection focuses chiefly on the past thirty years although there are key works from the 1950s and 1960s. It is accompanied by an excellent catalogue where curator Sebastian López achieves a succinct yet informative introduction and Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, a passionate essay on the tsunami-like effects of globalisation in Latin America. Figueroa’s Marxist-flavoured commentary includes quotes from Noam Chomsky on processes of capitalist expansion and by Eduardo Galeano from the 1970s when America meant the United States and the area south of the Rio Grande was a sub-America, a Third World entity whose identification was nebulous.
This positioning is born out