National pride: three Peruvians exhibit at MoMA, the great museum of modern art in the US: this is their work

Special from Manhattan, New York.

It is about dismantling prejudices anchored in our history, heritage and landscape, planted in our consciences after centuries of colonialism. Stories and landscapes to rewrite and revisit, stagnant visions to analyze and break. “Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. Gift and Beyond”, open in this city until September 9, brings together 65 works by Latin American artists that already make up the collection of the MoMA, in video, photography, painting and sculpture made in the last 25 years. El Comercio was invited to the inauguration together with press media from the GDA group.

Three Peruvian artists are part of the show, whose work is also already included in the MoMA collection: Gilda Mantilla and Elena Damiani offer works that question the most colonized forms of the landscape in Latin America. The first, with her husband Raimond Chaves, analyzes in “Secrets of the Amazon” (2011) anachronistic, almost racist discourses on this region, and contrasts them with images that they call “anti-landscape”. For its part, “Fading Field No. 1” (2012), the work of Damiani, addresses the history of images and the sublime construction of the romantic landscape.

Alongside them are two works by Armando Andrade Tudela, an artist with complex strategies. In his pieces there is a strong intention to value popular traditions, highlighting new meanings. In “Truck” (2003), through a series of slides, the artist obsessively pursues a series of cargo trucks whose hoppers are drawn with what he appreciates as geometric art. In his second piece, “Deformed Pottery” (2012), a video records a Chancay pre-Hispanic pottery, deformed due to its failed firing. This extraordinary object, part of the Amano Museum collection, is in tune with the tradition of Japanese “wabi-sabi”, which speaks to us of the beauty of imperfection. Thus, Andrade shares a precise simile to speak of a country that must be recognized in its wonder but also in its deformity.

As Gabriel Perez-Barreiro, Senior Advisor to the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, the institution responsible for donating Latin American art to MoMA, points out, it is no coincidence that works by three Peruvian artists participate in the show. “When traditions and original cultures weigh so heavily in a country, modernity cannot be thought of without linking one’s own roots. Peru was one of the paradigms of the enchantment of European travelers in the 19th century, and the images that they left us mark, until today, its tourist industry. With such consolidated visual codes, it is not surprising that artists critically rethink them”, he explains.

The past that unites us

Although we Latin Americans tend to focus more on what sets us apart, Inés Katzenstein, Curator of Latin American Art at MoMA, reminds us that there is a brand that unites us deeply: the colonial past. Paraphrasing Borges, let’s say that we are not united by love but by fear. The exhibition investigated by her focuses on the concept of coloniality, emphasizing how artists have studied, from the late 1980s to the present, foreign representations of their territories, opening interesting reflections on heritage and sovereignty. There are the iconic black and white photographs of the Argentine artist Leandro Katz on the Mayan ruins, or the video sculpture works of the Colombian José Alejandro Restrepo, one of the fathers of video art in the region, together with younger authors such as the Dominican Firelei Báez or the Argentine Adrián Villar Rojas, equally critical of the colonialist vision, but using means and languages ​​that are very different from the rather documentary works of older artists.

Peruvians at MoMA

An exhibition like “Chosen Memories” allows us to notice that, thanks to notable efforts such as those of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Foundation, in a relatively short time Latin American art has achieved a solid presence in museums as influential as the MoMA in New York. . “We do not play local, nor are we the most powerful in the game, but there is more and more articulation,” acknowledges the curator. A presence of which Peru is no stranger.

“Peruvian art has agents who are very active internationally and that is not negligible,” explains Katzenstein, who in addition to being a museum curator is director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Institute for the study of Latin American art: “At MoMA we work with many Peruvian artists . In addition, they have a museum like the MALI, as well as important curators and very serious historians. There is a connection with the discourses of the global south, with a very strong presence of the indigenous question. We don’t see it as an inbred scene at all.”

On the night of the opening, held last Tuesday, two Peruvian artists arrived at the gala half a block from the exclusive Fifth Avenue. For Elena Damiani, seeing her work exhibited represents a great professional achievement, but what stands out the most is the rigor of the research carried out by the museum and the institute sponsored by the renowned Venezuelan collector. “I have seen the academic level of this exhibition very rarely,” adds the photographer. On his part, for Armando Andrade his two exhibited works correspond to two very different moments of his work. “At that time, in Lima, nobody was interested in seeing them. And it would be fun if they start to be interested now, ”she jokes. “I think there is an essential problem: believing that contemporary art owes pre-Hispanic art. I think you owe him nothing. It is due to what is happening in Peru, now. Why take responsibility for continuing to look back in order to build? Who asks us to always have to lean on that crutch? wonders the artist. Issues that remain floating in the noise of the Big Apple.