New York, Apr 25 (EFE).- The Latin American art exhibition that will be presented by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) on April 30, “Recuerdos elegidos”, has history as a point of reflection for the work of 39 artists, whose works were donated to the institution in the last 25 years by the Venezuelan collector Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.
The exhibition, which will run until September 9, includes 65 works, including videos, photographs, paintings, sculptures, and video-installations, from MoMA’s extensive Latin American collection, as well as recent acquisitions, a mural commissioned by the Brazilian Iran do Espirito Santo and select loans.
The first exhibition of works donated by the Cisneros family was in 2019 and included works made in South America between 1940 and 1970; “Chosen Memories” is a second show “but, in this case, very different,” with works of contemporary art from the 1980s to the present, said Argentine Inés Katzenstein, curator of Latin American art.
Katzenstein explained to EFE that this new selection talks about how artists relate to history and the past, and is part of a “very detailed” study of the works donated by the Cisneros family to MoMa in 2016.
This study “discovers that the issue of retrospection is fundamental and in some of them it is intimate, and it has to do with affective memories, family memories, with mourning, with ways of honoring the past in family terms,” said the also director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Latin American Art at MoMA.
RETURNS
He added that, in other works, the relationship with history is broader: it is social, it is also political, as shown in the first part, “Returns”, in which the artists “go” to different places in the past to investigate history. .
“This section is dedicated to the different ways in which Latin American artists have been rethinking the relationship with the territory and history, trying in some way to offer liberating visions in terms of being able to produce their own representations of the territory in relation to the long history of foreign representations”, he pointed out during the tour of the exhibition.
In this section, a work by the Colombian José Alejandro Restrepo stands out, a pioneer of video art, who reconstructs the journey of the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt in 1801 through the northern part of the Andes.
A video sculpture with a pyramid of televisions of various sizes shows the artist’s ascent on foot through the mythical Paso del Quindio, known for its difficulty and its strategic importance in the region’s political history, according to the exhibition.
“Restrepo decided to redo that path in 1992 and represent it in his own way, starting from this kind of pyramid of monitors that shows that famous step”, commented the curator.
TRADITIONS AND KINSHIP
The second part, “Reverberation”, deals with how contemporary artists are dealing with long-standing traditions that have been devalued by modernity and then recovered in their own way in their work.
“Artists decide to maintain, recover and reinforce (those traditions) in their work,” says Katzenstein, citing the work of Cuban José Bedia, with a career spanning four decades and who since the 1980s has been one of the most prominent figures of his country’s art and works on Afro-Cuban myths.
The third part of the exhibition has been called “Kinship”. “Kinship is important as a way of connecting through time and this is the most intimate and sentimental part of the exhibition,” says the curator.
“The kinship network appears as a form of intertemporal connection, and talks about the construction of kinship as a form of connection with the past and, in some way, of healing”, he comments.
Uruguay, Guatemala, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Cuba, Chile, Brazil, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic are represented in the exhibition.
