23:00 minutes
Los rastreadores is a two-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz narrating the story of a fictitious drug lord, Ernesto Suarez, whose character is based on the well-known Bolivian drug dealer, Roberto Suárez. In the video, Suarez returns home from prison and survives a massacre that takes place at his home in Bolivia. Told in four chapters, the story is inspired by John Ford’s American Western classic film The Searchers (1956), this work similarly focuses on the politicized atmosphere of Bolivian history, searching for cues of race and alienation. Bringing together a Nazi officer, a Bolivian drug lord, and indigenous peoples of Bolivia—perceived to be inferior by mestizos and people of European origin—in one story, Joskowicz exposes the hidden power relationships and hierarchies of Bolivia’s history, problematizing race and class.
Claudia Joskowicz is a video and installation artist working at the intersection of landscape, history, and memory. Her works form unsettling scenes that reimagine public and private histories of Latin American individuals and communities. Blurring the line between documentary and fiction, these works often involve violent images to bring traumas to the present, and to offer a moment of catharsis for the ones who were affected by these incidents in some way. In her works, Joskowicz intentionally gives a great amount of power and agency to the camera, reminding the viewer of their passive role in the construction of history. In this way, the artist critiques technology as a medium that easily manipulates one’s interpretation of history, controlling what gets to survive in the public collective memory. As Joskowicz’s camera wanders around the landscape, or focuses on one of the protagonists in her stories, the rest of the scene—and with it, other possible perspectives—fall into the dark, constructing yet another subjective historical narrative. It’s easy to focus on the slow movement of the camera more so than the actual event being recorded, which Joskowicz harnesses to remind her viewers that history is man-made. When texts or events are taken out of their context and technology is present to create an imaginary cinematic space, any narrative is possible.
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
Milena Bonilla’s discursive practice explores connections among economics, territory, and politics through everyday interventions...
This photograph is part of the series titled “Iris Tingitana project” (2007) focusing on the disappearance of the iris...
Ramirez’s The International Sail is the fifth in a series that features an upside-down worn out, mended and fragmented boat sail...
Re: Looking marks a new phase in Wong’s work which connects his region’s history with other parts of the world...
Part of a larger series of photographic works, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck’s Corrupted file from page 14 (V1) from the series La Vega, Plan Caracas No...
Destilaciones ( Distillations , 2014) is an installation composed of a group of ceramic pots, presented on the floor and within a steel structure...
For I use to eat lemon meringue pie till I overloaded on my pancreas with sugar and passed out; It seemed to be a natural response to a society of abundance (1978), also known as the Bodybuilder series, Martinez asked male bodybuilding competitors to pose in whatever position felt “most natural.” They are obviously trained in presenting their ambitiously carved physiques, but their facial expressions seem comparatively unstudied...
The lengthy titles in Chen Xiaoyun’s work often appear as colophons to his photographs that invite the viewer to a process of self realization through contemplating the distance between word and image...
These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory...
Enrique Ramirez’s La Memoria Verde is a work of poetry, politics, and memory created in response to the curatorial statement for the 13th Havana Biennial in 2019, The Construction of the Possible ...
The central point of Vanishing Point is the most direct physiological reaction of the body to the environment...
Martinez’s sculpture A meditation on the possibility… of romantic love or where you goin’ with that gun in your hand , Bobby Seale and Huey Newton discuss the relationship between expressionism and social reality in Hitler’s painting depicts the legendary Black Panther leaders Huey P...
In Ante la imagen (Before the Image, 2009) Muñoz continues to explore the power of a photograph to live up to the memory of a specific person...
The threshold in contemporary Pakistan between the security of private life and the increasingly violent and unpredictable public sphere is represented in Abidi’s 2009 series Karachi ...