F.5 Latin American Art and Culture: Case Studies in Community Engagement, Part 1
Sat Oct 17 / 9:00 – 10:30
voice_chat expiredguest chair / Ignacio Adriasola, University of British Columbia
Ignacio Adriasola is assistant professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia. He is currently finishing a book on experimental art and the aesthetics of political disaffection in 1960s Japan.
F.5.1 Community, Activism, Intellectual and Artistic Experience in the First Phase of TAI (1974-78)
Brian Smith Hudson, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
In 1974, students of the Aesthetics Class led by the theoretician Alberto Híjar of the FFyL-UNAM, began the Taller de Arte e Ideología group (TAI), one of the most prolific and complex collectives of the Mexican "Generation of Groups" from the 1970s. The relationship between theory and practice at TAI was fundamental. It was the political and intellectual searches of each member that arise the collective's methodology. These were linked to the development of theory and practical work based on applied knowledge about its own historicity and context, which demanded the ideological position of its members. Together they highlighted the collective work and the capacity for discuss and approach from Marxist theory, all the political and social phenomena that occurred in their presents. This intellectual and artistic community understood by Roberto Esposito as a “debt” between his partners, strategies of rupture half-opened towards the domain of the Mexican political and artistic institutionality.
Thus is why I propose to analyze the actions carried out during the first phase of the TAI (1974-78), in order to glimpse the implications that the notion of artistic activism and community had in them, approached by Marcelo Expósito, Ana Vidal and Jaime Vindel (in one hand), and Roberto Esposito (in the other), to identify and value the intellectual, activist and artistic production of the group. In specific, I am interested in looking at how and from what positionalities this group emerged; what dynamics characterized TAI’s first phase; what factors influenced the creation of this collective and shaped its relationship with art, aesthetics in and from the academic space.
Brian Smith is currently completing his PhD in Art History at the National University of Mexico. He has co-authored and edited books about Mexican and Chilean performance art, and Chilean Politic Theater. He has also published articles about arts and politics in Latin America. He has been awarded with the IBERO-FICSAC (2017). He has also been awarded by the Chilean National Fund for Art (FONDART) in 2014 and 2017. Recently, he received a scholarship from the OEI and CONACYT Mexico (in 2015 and 2019). He has also participated in academic and artistic meetings as a moderator and speaker, have worked in different museums and cultural institutions, and as a tutor for bachelor's and master's theses at different universities.
F.5.2 Hecho en Cuba, Heard Around the World: Local and Global Performative Srategies for Socio-Political Artivism by Tania Bruguera
Felicia Franca Leu, Université du Québec à Montréal
“That one day freedom of expression in Cuba will not be a performance“ describes the artivist approach of the work of Cuban artist, Tania Bruguera, in a nutshell. By expanding the idea of performance, Bruguera uses social spaces to empower her spectators in order to initiate change to effectively fight against human rights violations by the Cuban government. Through her performance Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (2009), Bruguera gave her audience a moment of free speech at Centro Wifredo Lam, Havana. In 2014, she attempted to restage this piece on Revolution Square in Havana, but was arrested multiple times, accused of stimulating public disturbance, and thus the performance was prevented.
The following research will explore two artivistic strategies that Bruguera uses to initiate socio-political change via creative protest: (1) The engagement of the present, Cuban audience in her artivist performances by providing a platform to the participants, thereby trying to create a community who is speaking up for the same values, (2) The implication of her global community who she is addressing virtually. Bruguera uses her international attention in combination with the new condition of hypervisibility of digital technology to raise awareness about violations of human rights in her home country: Via digital media, she is informing the public about her dissident arrests, intimidation and harassment from the Cuban State, in this framework also referring to the performative movement #YOTAMBIENEXIJO (2014-ongoing). Proposing this specific case study on artist Tania Bruguera and on her Western reception through mediation will underline the continuing absence of ‘other’ Cuban artivists in Western discourse. Therefore, the contribution at hand aims to close with a brief commentary on this continuation, thus questioning the Western way of storytelling Cuban performance art.
Felicia F. Leu currently works on her PhD-Thesis about the reception of socially engaged performance art, supervised by Professor Barbara Clausen at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). She studied Psychology and Art History in Munich, Vienna and Paris. In 2019, she graduated as best of her semester from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU). Linking psychology and art history, her primary research focus lies in the potential transformative effects of art on its audience; she published various contributions on the subject. She assisted curatorial teams at the MoMA in New York (2019), the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2018) and the Haus der Kunst in Munich (2016). In 2020, she curated the exhibition Horst Antes. Kopffüssler in collaboration with the Franz Marc Museum in Kochel and the Center for Advanced Studies LMU in Munich, Germany. Linking psychology and art history, her primary research focus lies in the potential transformative effects of art on its audience; she published various contributions on the subject.
Yoshua Okón, Octopus, 2011. Video still. Courtesy of the artist.
F.5.3 EXTRACOLONIAL: Reflections for Action
Noor Alé & Claudia Mattos, independent curators
EXTRACOLONIAL: Reflections for Action is an essay that was written to accompany an exhibition of the same name presented at Sur Gallery/Latin American-Canadian Art Projects in Toronto (February 12 to April 4, 2020). Reflecting on the centuries-long history of natural resource extraction in the Americas, the essay and exhibition brought together a group of Indigenous and Latin American artists – Ulysses Castellanos, Monica Gutierrez Quintero, Yoshua Okón, and Onaman Collective – whose works examine the relationship between extractivism and colonialism in a long and violent legacy of resource exploitation. These works propose alternate activist models to address the sustained systems of inequality seeded in this legacy, including the uneven movement of capital, expropriation of Indigenous ancestral lands, deterioration of the natural landscape, and instances of civil unrest. The title of this essay and exhibition married the terms extractivism and colonialism to evoke their inextricable relationship, nodding towards the deep and insidious roots of this union throughout the Americas. The subtitle is borrowed from Alberto Acosta’s article Post-Extractivism: From Discourse to Practice — Reflections for Action, an activist manifesto that proposes new ways of living with and within the land to undo the grip of extractivism from Latin America’s various economies. Acosta, the former Ecuadorian Minister of Energy and Mines, advocates for the implementation of widespread socio-environmental reform to protect undeveloped, natural environments and the legal interests and socio-economic needs of those peoples whose ways of life are placed into jeopardy by extractive activities. These conditions shape a constellation of conflicts and financial agendas that place into jeopardy the humanitarian, economic, and environmental well-being of primarily Indigenous communities across the two continents. Looking beyond policy and approaching art as activism, the works examined in this essay and exhibition expose entrenched systems of oppression, putting forward strategies to undermine extractive profiteering and the colonial apparatus.
AXIS is a socially-engaged curatorial collaborative composed of Noor Alé and Claudia Mattos. Our research interests include social practice art, the intersection between art and technology, and contemporary art of Latin American and Middle Eastern diasporas. As a curatorial collective working across geographic boundaries, we are interested in the urgent questions of representation that typify our contemporary, global moment.
Noor Alé is an independent curator and art historian. She has worked at the National Gallery of Canada; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Art Dubai; and the Art Gallery of Ontario. She holds an MA in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art.
Claudia Mattos is Director at the gallery David Castillo, Miami. She has curated exhibitions and contributed to research at The Baltimore Museum of Art; Performa; the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. She earned an MA in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art.
