Regina José Galindo asked a dentist to insert eight pieces of pure gold extracted from the mines in her country, Guatemala, into her teeth.
These very expensive fillings were removed by another dentist in Berlin.
The pieces that came out of her mouth are now small sculptures that are exhibited at the MoMA in New York and that contribute to the social debate that museums have been engaged in for a few years: decolonization.
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Juan de Pareja, slave and apprentice of Velázquez, the first known Afro-Hispanic painter
There is no nostalgia or direct political criticism in
Chosen Memories
, the exhibition that brings together more than 60 works donated to the museum by the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (which has invited this newspaper to visit the exhibition) over the last few years. 25 years.
“It is not a debate that touches this collection, but I do believe that many of the exhibited works give it subtly,” says Inés Katzenstein, curator who is also responsible for Latin American art at the New York institution.
The work
Sacking
by the Guatemalan artist denounces from the title "the violence of extractive economies".
That is, how exhaustive and indiscriminate mining in Guatemala has become a new colonialism, the contemporary version of the theft of resources from Latin American countries.
“We are eternally looted people, but we are also resilient,” writes Regina José Galindo.
'Tulúm, after Catherwood [The Castle]', by Leandro Katz, 1985. Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros through the Latin American and Caribbean Fund in honor of May Castleberry. Courtesy of MoMA
His work dialogues with that of 38 other Latin American artists who may not be so direct in their messages, but "imagine restorative ways" to portray their worlds, as is the case with the landscapes of the Colombian José Alejandro Restrepo and the lithographs of the Argentine Leandro Katz.
In his works there is a clear critical review of how the European gaze has been imposed for centuries on Latin American territories and bodies.
In
Chosen Memories
the colonial glasses have lost their prescription.
"Many works can be political when they generate thought, not necessarily when they define themselves as high-impact political art," explains the curator, who considers that the debate on the decolonization of museums is more limited to those institutions that house pieces archaeological, not so much to contemporary art museums as is the case with MoMA.
Two women observe the work titled 'Quindío Way', by Colombian artist José Alejandro Restrepo, at MoMA. Ángel Colmenares (EFE)
What perhaps the most modern artists have achieved, such as those that
Chosen Memories
brings together with works from the end of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st, is to confirm —with more ease than the pre-Columbian remains, for example— that colonization also it was artistic.
His way of undoing this story is through video, sound installations, assemblage, photography... This is how one fights, as can be read on the cartouches of the exhibition, the colonial structures that continue to condition ancestral cultures, even though they have already passed centuries since the independence of the countries of Latin America.
a single reading
Although the Cisneros collection has always been identified with Latin American geometric abstraction, its founder quickly realized that "there was only one reading about Latin America," says Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, the former director and chief curator of the collection. , now a consultant to Cisneros, one of the largest private art collectors in the world.
"That's why she began to look for indigenous work, even Afro, a very strong claim now in the United States."
It was not very difficult for him to find these pieces.
It has been history that has placed these artists on the margins, but Cisneros and her husband, Gustavo, have been asking Latin American creators for years what they are up to.
“She is a workshop collector, she wants to meet the artists, see how they work, she is guided by her interests.
Her husband knows the history of Latin America well, how these countries have been constituted.
It wasn't hard for them to find them."
The art expert considers that at this moment “an intentional and politicized reading is given to these issues, but somehow they have been in the collection for a long time.
That reflection on history and identity precedes this specific moment.”
'Thread' (Thread) by the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles, at the MoMA in New York. Ángel Colmenares (EFE)
Many of these pieces have been in the Cisneros collection for more than 15 years, who always had a clear commitment to deconstructing "a paradigm for Latin America, which was Mexican muralism, Frida Kahlo or magical realism," continues Pérez-Barreiro.
The more than a hundred pieces donated by the collector to MoMA in 2016 were not intended to be configured as "a Latin American wing", an isolated space, but to be inserted into the museum discourse as part of the History of Art.
Katzenstein, the third head of Latin American art at this institution since the 1990s, has taken on this task in two ways.
On the one hand, it manages 5,000 works by artists from this region, not from a watertight department, but ensures that areas such as the drawing or sculpture areas of the museum take these pieces into account when rearranging the rooms of the permanent collection , constantly changing.
In addition, in these more than three decades in which MoMA has had a person in charge of Latin American art, efforts have been concentrated on monographic exhibitions.
Now, under Katzenstein's mandate, it goes a little further with this choral and thematic exhibition that, although those responsible do not want to place it as part of the current debate on the decolonization of museums, does take advantage of the fact that "history is a living organism, in permanent reading and reevaluation”, as the Brazilian photographer Rosângela Rennó writes.
Chosen Memories
, from April 30 to September 9 at MoMA.
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