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.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Alka domo by Seba Calfuqueo is a performative video work that recontextualizes a story about Caupolicán, the Mapuche toki (meaning symbol of strength and perseverance in the face of adversity). Caupolicán was elected military leader by the Mapuche people of Chile after successfully completing the challenge of holding a log on his shoulders for two days. Caupolicán led the Mapuche army in the first uprising against the Spanish conquistadors from 1553 to 1558.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

During her research on primitive currencies and cultural cannibalism, Cuevas came across the Donald Duck comic book issue “The Stone Money Mystery,” where Donald goes on a quest to find missing museum objects. Cuevas’s America (2006) is a wall painting of a comic Donald Duck wallowing in a heap of gold coins, alluding to Mexico’s postrevolutionary mural tradition. The mural’s background is one of the earliest illustrations of flora and fauna in the American continent, juxtaposed with a reference to America as having bountiful natural resources available to be exploited, and the historical use of comics as ideological tools.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

El gran pacto de Chile (The Great Pact) and La balserita de Puerto Gala (The Raft) were part of the “Museo Futuro”, an exhibition in which the artist presented nine miniature dioramas staging fragments of Chile’s history, from its colonial invasions to the present. Through the episodes he chose to depict, the artist focused on historical narratives, the way the story is told, and the supposed irrefutability of historical facts. Museo Futuro (“Future Museum”) stands within a tradition of artists who re-read history and offer their interpretation of it through the distopic lens of the museum display.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

El gran pacto de Chile (The Great Pact) and La balserita de Puerto Gala (The Raft) were part of the “Museo Futuro”, an exhibition in which the artist presented nine miniature dioramas staging fragments of Chile’s history, from its colonial invasions to the present. Through the episodes he chose to depict, the artist focused on historical narratives, the way the story is told, and the supposed irrefutability of historical facts. Museo Futuro (“Future Museum”) stands within a tradition of artists who re-read history and offer their interpretation of it through the distopic lens of the museum display.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

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?)