Photography (Photography)

La manzana de Adán (La Palmera, Santiago) by Paz Errázuriz is part of the celebrated series La manzana de Adán (Adam’s apple) that spans 5 years (1982-1987) of documenting the lives of transgender sex workers in La Jaula and La Palmera brothels in the Chilean cities of Talca and Santiago. The series, whose subjects were extremely subversive, as well as critically vulnerable to the repressive political regime, were finally shown in Chile shortly before the end of the dictatorship in 1990, and later compiled in a book of the same title with texts by Peruvian writer Claudia Donoso. This work portrays a scene at La Palmera brothel in Santiago.

Textile (Textile)

Cosmic Tautology I and II are two textile pieces representative of Santiago Borja’s practice and long-standing interest in disrupting universalist assumptions of minimalism by connecting them with other, non-Western or esoteric references. They were hand-woven in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico, and are composed of nine squares, the middle one left unwoven. Their composition is based on Red Square, White Letters (1962) by Sol Lewit, but they also take cues from works like Black Series II by Frank Stella.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Untitled consists of a small wooden sculpture that leans against a wall. Here, a rectangular piece of wood holds a folded article from a vintage design magazine whose Italian text states: “Villa per una persona sola. Arquitectura Pasadena California.” On the flipside of the paper is a feature with different images of paintings and architecture, including a painting by Piet Mondrian.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The series Castigos del caucho by Santiago Yahuarcani originates in the oral memory transmitted by the artist’s grandfather, who was a survivor of the Putumayo genocide where thousands of Indigenous people were annihilated and enslaved to extract rubber from the Amazon forest between 1879 and 1912. Yahuarcani’s complex narrative paintings on tree bark highlight a long history of colonial violence against the Uitoto and other Indigenous communities. They also show the destruction of the rainforest under Western models of extraction, privatization, and development.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Curtis Talwst Santiago has been creating intimate and performative environments within these small spaces for several years; the artist used to carry them around to show visitors one on one, opening up a scene in the space of his hand. Santiago considers these mobile box enclosures a method of transporting narratives of home and intimacy, diasporic identity, and experiences most often hidden or concealed from view. These Walls is a sculptural piece made from a reclaimed jewelry box, clay, paint, wool, plastic figurines, and human hair.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Another curious element is that it seemed that I was seeing images from the dreams I had that afternoon. But these images were appearing from end to beginning, like a film reel running backwards. I also couldn’t properly situate them.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Marché Salomon by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz depicts two meat vendors, a young man and woman, chatting in Marché Salomon, a busy Port-au-Prince market. Amongst the surrounding bustle, the two have an unsentimental discussion about the mystical qualities of common products sold at the market, wondering whether the divine can inhabit any kind of object—mass produced bottles, toxic rivers, beheaded goats. Their musings weave together the cosmic and the mundane, with the work of butchering a goat and the characters of the market serving as existential metaphors for the universe, time travel, ghosts, and death.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

La cabeza mató a todos or “The Head that Killed Everyone”, is a mixing of indigenous mythologies with present-day characters, geographies, and culture in Puerto Rico. The title refers to how a shooting star was (in local mythology) interpreted as a head without a body, crossing the sky, signaling the arrival of chaos and destruction. The actor in the video, Michelle Nonó, is in touch with native plants—she’s a medicinal botanist but also a cultural activist.

Installation (Installation)

The work Sarta (String) by Reyes Santiago Roja is part of a larger series of works that examine the commercialization of the tobacco plant and its relationship to the meaning and use of tobacco by Native American tribes such as the Mayas, Aztecs, Incas or Tainos, which attributed spiritual qualities to tobacco such as the smoke carrying one’s thoughts and prayers to the sprits. In this work the artist studied the forms of tobacco leaves native to Latin America and recreated their shapes with commercial tobacco packaging from such global brands as Marlboro or Camel to the most popular Colombian brand Pielroja. The leaves made of the packaging material are lined up on a string as if they are hung out to dry as in traditional tobacco making processes.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Palabrarma (obreros palabreando) by Cecilia Vicuña is a series of works in which the artist blends poetry, political commentary and graphic design. The title itself is a portmanteau that unites the words palabra (word) and arma (weapon) that speaks literally of the power of words through their poetic potential. A poet herself, Vicuña developed a long series of palabrarmas on diverse media that were often used as slogans in political demonstrations.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Adrian Balseca’s Suspensión I inverts the logic of the old colonial game, the greasy pole. Digitally filmed in the Province of Morona Santiago among the last existing community at the entrance of the Sangay National Park, a native girl climbs a balsa tree trunk from which plastic containers filled with “local” fossil fuels hang (super, extra, eco-país, gasoline, diesel, etc.). The trunk – which is lightweight quality wood, typical of the subtropical jungle of Ecuador -– has been cut down and suspended vertically and the trophies of modern progress hang from it.

Textile (Textile)

The title for this body of work, Poco se gana hilando, pero menos mirando , is based on a Spanish saying that underestimates feminized crafts or tasks, implying that it is better for a woman to be doing ‘something’, no matter how useless it is, instead of just doing nothing. This series of works by Claudia Gutiérrez Marfull features embroideries that represent the peripheral and marginalized landscapes of Puente Alto commune in Santiago, the city’s biggest district and its most southern outskirts. In 2015, when this work was produced, there was not a single health service provider, police station, pharmacy, daycare or school in the whole area of Puente Alto.

Installation (Installation)

Ramirez’s The International Sail is the fifth in a series that features an upside-down worn out, mended and fragmented boat sail. These works epitomize the idea of perpetual movement and migration while carrying a deep personal meaning in the creative process, as the artist’s father himself, still living in Chile, mends and sends the sails to his son, living in Europe. The reversed position of the sail recalls both the shape of South America itself and the Eurocentric view that in the Southern Hemisphere, everything is “upside-down.” The stitches themselves create an illusion of an alternative political geography, and the framed-cuts impose a cartographic grid.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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 . Other well known works by Ramirez feature the movement and endless symbolism of the sea—like the simultaneous engagement and retreat of the tide—but La Memoria Verde takes the land, plant life, and its human inhabitants as its subject. The film begins with a soft, green, algae-like image that waxes and wanes in focus, then gives way to swaying treetops blowing in a soft wind.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Un Hombre que Camina (A Man Walking) (2011-2014), the sense of rhythm and timing is overpowered by the colossal sense of timelessness of this peculiar place. Shot in Uyuni, Bolivia, the film depcits world’s largest salt flat, a site that sits in a mountainous region at over twelve thousand feet above sea level. Ramirez’s work is deeply invested in the loss of regional identity, and the anachronistic dress of his “modern-day shaman” in the film is meant to reconcile the historical and cultural gaps between tribal traditions of a specific time and place and the all-too-prevalent homogeneity brought on by advanced capitalism.

Installation (Installation)

Primero estaba el mar ( First Was the Sea , 2012) is a system of equivalences between syllables and silhouettes of waveforms cast in cement. Each waveform represents a syllable of the sentence “Primero estaba el mar.” This sentence is the first verse of the Kogui poem of creation. For the Koguis, an indigenous community from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta on the Colombian Caribbean coast, water was the absolute presence before the creation of the universe.

Installation (Installation)

Canción para un fósil canoro (Song for a chanting fossil) by Rometti Costales is inspired by the history of the building that currently hosts the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (MSSA) in Santiago, Chile. The duo associated the layers of the building’s history with the vestiges of life and the processes of fossilization that have taken place in areas of the Atacama Desert, a territory that has been the stage for several episodes in Chile’s tumultuous economic and political history. The work operates as a metaphor for the strata of historical memory, condensing different materials and operations.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

He Xiangyu’s Terminal 3 presents excerpts from the lives of young African acrobats attending the Hebei Wuqiao Acrobatic Arts School in China. Acrobatics, which had a rich history as a court display in imperial China, is now integral to the cultural industries and tourism sector in Wuqiao, continuing a legacy of expending bodies for monetary gain. From 2016 to 2019, He intermittently went to Wuqiao Acrobatics School in Hebei Province to record the daily lives of the students who study a variety of acrobatic skills during their year-long program.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The artist films a horse dressage session at night, in a dimly lit manège. In this video the artist recalls the importance of traditional equestrian portraits in Spanish painting and relates to the repetitive passage between the rider and the mount. This effect of repetition is accentuated by the video played in a loop and the fixed framing of the image shot from the ground, with body posture and dressage themes as a method for training and obedience.