Untitled (Given a wall, what's happening behind it?)

2016 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

121.92 x 121.92 cm.

Cristóbal Lehyt

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Cristóbal Lehyt has conducted thorough research on the historical and cultural complexity of the northern region of Chile where the Atacama Desert is located. This area, rich both in terms of its cultural heritage and its natural resources (such as the copper mines), is at the origins of some of the most dramatic episodes in the country’s recent political history. With the series Untitled (Given a wall, what’s happening behind it?) Lehyt invites the viewer to read the inscription of death in the desert landscape, while raising questions on the status of the image: How does it respond to its original environment, and how does it portray the history of the context that generates it? In whose name does an image speak and what kind of drama does it project?

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Cristóbal Lehyt’s work exposes the cultural gap that might separate one cultural scene from another and the potential misunderstandings this might provoke. His series El Norte derived from a specific location in Northern Chile in the Atacama Desert. This area has historically been the scene of various geo-political battles (between Chile, Bolivia and Perú), and contested economic resources, such as nitrate and copper mines. The drawings, paintings, and photographs that comprise this series deliberately question the patriotic sense of national identity, as well as Chile’s colonial history. They also evidence Lehyt’s consciously detached position from the legacy of the Chilean avant-garde scene (‘escena de avanzada’) that held a militant discourse against Pinochet’s dictatorship, in an effort to re-signify political art and critical practices.

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Colors:

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• mummy.n.02
• grave.n.02
• memory.n.02
• dictatorship.n.01
• archeology.n.01