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Latin American art has its origins in the many different indigenous cultures that inhabited the continent before the Spanish invasion in the 16th Century. Each culture developed sophisticated artistic criteria, which in most cases was strongly linked with religious conceptions.
The Latin American contemporary art and especially the video-art has become more innovative and broader of conceptions.
Video is a digital art form and, as such, both contemporary and universal; it is subject to global trends. To specifically characterise Latin-American video art it is not only related to religious conceptions, Indian cultures and internal conflicts.
In contrast with Europe, there is hardly any financial support in Latin America for digital artistic productions. So media artists are in a tough situation. Most distribution channels are set up and maintained by individuals - often exhibition curators or initiators of media projects. Many video artists have to find jobs in other sectors to finance their art. This makes some of them leave video art for what it is after a few years, but it also makes the art form more diverse and multi-disciplinary.
Curated by Marjan van Mourik
- Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
- Martin Bonadeo
- Grimanesa Amoros
- Manuela Viera Gallo
- Cristóbal León
Pulsefront Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967. In 1989 he received a B.Sc. in Physical Chemistry from Concordia University in Montréal, Canada.Electronic artist, develops large-scale interactive installations in public space, usually deploying new technologies and custom-made physical interfaces. Using robotics, projections, sound, internet and cell-phone links, sensors and other devices, his installations aim to provide "temporary antimonuments for alien agency". His work has been commissioned for events such as the Millennium Celebrations in Mexico City (1999), the Cultural Capital of Europe in Rotterdam (2001), the United Nations World Summit of Cities in Lyon (2003), the opening of the Yamaguchi Centre for Art and Media in Japan (2003) and the Expansion of the European Union in Dublin (2004).
His work in kinetic sculpture, responsive environments, video installation and photography has been shown in two dozen countries, including Art Basel Unlimited (Switzerland), the Sydney Biennale (Australia), the Liverpool Biennial (UK), the Shanghai Biennial (China), the Itaú Cultural (Brazil), the Istanbul Biennial (Turkey), the ARCO art fair (Spain), Bienal de la Habana (Cuba), Architecture and Media Biennale (Austria), Laboratorio Arte Alameda (Mexico), the Musée des Beaux Arts (Canada), European Media Art Festival (Germany) and others. His work is in private and public contemporary art collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Jumex collection in Mexico and the Daros Foundation in Zürich.
At the Prix Ars Electronica in Austria, his pieces have received a Golden Nica, a distinction and two honourable mentions. He also won two BAFTA British Academy Awards for Interactive Art in London, "Best Installation" at the IDMA awards in Toronto, a "Design Review Gold Award" given by I.D. Magazine, a Cyberstar award in Cologne, a distinction at the SFMOMA Webby Awards in San Francisco, "Artist/performer of the year" at Wired Magazines Rave Awards, an Excellence Prize at the CG Arts Media Art Festival in Tokyo, WTN award in the Arts Category, a Rockefeller fellowship, a Langlois Grant, the Trophée des Lumières in Lyon, HorizonZero best interactive installation and an International Bauhaus Award in Dessau, Germany.
He has given many workshops and conferences, most recently at Goldsmiths college and The Bartlett school of architecture in London, ICC in Tokyo, Loopholes symposium at Harvard, at the MIT MediaLab, the Guggenheim Museum, IDCA in Aspen, LA MOCA, Netherlands Architecture Institute, UC Berkeley, Berlin Transmediale, British National Museum of Photography and the Art Institute of Chicago.
His writing has been published in Kunstforum (Germany), Leonardo (USA), Performance Research (UK), Telepolis (Germany), Movimiento Actual (Mexico), Archis (Netherlands), Aztlán (USA) and other art and media publications. He has been in several international juries and committees, including the Fondation Daniel Langlois, ISEA, Hexagram, Prix Milia d’Or in Cannes, GMD in Bonn, the International Art and A-life award and Cyberconf in Madrid. He has been a resident artist twice at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada.
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Experimental | 00:01:00
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Moebius Display Martin Bonadeo
Video: Moebius Display, dynamic luminic sculpture The existence of an infinite "strip" of 1s and 0s in the physical universe is a bit problematic. Couldnt one use some sort of Hilbert curve to pack an infinite line into a two dimensional space and read off the digits approximately?Answer: Just make the strip a "Moebius Stripe".
Moebius display is a new output interfase development. This interfase is a simple LED (light emitting diode) screen that has a spatial and conceptual modification.Instead of being flat as the majority of screens, it is moebius stripe shaped, a three-dimensional representation of the infinite. T his new space for expression is one of the first non-Euclidean space as an output for a computer, and brings to surface many questions about visual and spatial representations.
The idea of looking at an image or a word moving in a one sided three dimensional object expresses ambiguity. the piece is always showing at the same time two contradictory ideas, two poles sharing the same space. This piece has been possible thanks to the Telefonica | MAMBA | LIMB0 art and new technology grand prix and and an OSRAM LED donation.
The next step in the development of this project include a change of scale (20 times bigger) and the inclusion of full color LED pixels.
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:01:00
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La Procesion Grimanesa Amoros
The forces of life and death are often seen as opposed and our own fear of dying renders us incapable of understanding their interconnectedness; however, death as an integral stage of existence is impossible to ignore. Destruction necessarily precedes creation; we are all bound in a continual--material if not spiritual--cycle of death and rebirth. The ritualization of death, as evidenced in religious and funerary traditions such as the procesiones of Peru, imposes order on what seems to be an arbitrary and chaotic process--the earthly end of a human being. When I was a child, my mother used to take me to see the procesiones Del Senor de Los Milagros; masses of people dressed in purple wound their way through the streets of Lima, evoking images of waves, of forces of nature. The disorderly individuals of the crowd seemed to dissolve in the midst of the ritual.A different sort of order permeates La Procesión --a rhythm of emergence and decay. The dominant motif of the video is water--a life-giving and destructive force. Water is also associated with the idea of a state of flux; Greek mythology has souls passing over the river Styx in transit from the land of the living to a watery underworld. The disembodied faces of the film also float in a state of ambiguity and transition, oscillating to the rhythm of the waters current. They decay into skulls, which dissolve into an explosion of new faces. The final image of the film conflates the paradoxical themes of life and death--a woman appears lifeless under the waves. The crest of the water obscures the view of her eyes. We barely make out a flicker of the lids, and we are left asking is she alive.
The imagery in La Procesión is purposefully subtle. The mere suggestion of so grave a theme as death is apt to evoke reflection on the part of the viewer. The restrained, calm quality of the visuals is enhanced by the soundtrack, which was created especially for the video by the composer Omar Jon Ajluni. I want viewers to see their own experiences reflected in this video and to realize perhaps some of their deeper, more unconscious attitudes vis-à-vis the visage of death.
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:04:17
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Unfinished Business Manuela Viera Gallo
“Chile is a small country traumatized by a long dictatorship with an island mentality and powerful natural barriers: a high mountain range blocks us off the East while the country ends with the Pacific in the West.” (Catalina Mena) Born in Rome, Italy, in 1977 where her family lived in exile, MANUELA VIERA GALLO came back to Santiago Chile in 1984 when the military regime was strong in power.„The armed fraction of the Communist party (Frente Patriotico Manuel Rodriguez) were preparing an (unsuccessful) assault to kill Pinochet and the situation was tense. I had mixed feelings because Italy was my childhood country and my parents were political figures. They were still frightened but happy to come back to their country, even though Pinochet was still in power.“ (MVG)
In 1989 Chile had its first democratic election since the putsch and a coalition of center left wing formed the government.
„It was a slow and complex transition process where Pinochet and the conservatives still had a lot of control over the country. I finished high school in a liberal English institution. When the dictatorship ended, it felt like a great time, where Chile was changing, and all the young people stormed the streets and a cultural breach was possible. Then I studied art in college, and all the critics and curators called us the ‚post-dictatorship generation from 2000‘.
We were the first generation with internet access, digital art and multi-media languages, and the feeling of a future, of globalization, of ‚looking over the mountain‘. But we also did not forget the recent past and quite some of us refer to it in our works and theorization.“ (MVG)
Manuela Viera Gallo’s recent video works CAIDA LIBRE (FREE FALL 2006) and UNFINISHED BUSINESS (2006) are uncannily aestheticized images of destruction. They deal with the fall of ideologies and in particular the dictatorship in Chile. In her work the artist manipulates the processes of political and social memory by using aesthetic interventions as intensifier of charged imagery of former political iconographies such as the photographs of Pinochet in UNFINISHED BUSINESS. Here the surfaces of the historical photo material dissolve slowly in front of the camera as the artist pours out Clorox over them. The chemicals slowly lift the color from the papers surface, carrying them off screen as the liquid flows from view (not unlike in ‚spiritualist‘ photography of the turn of the 19th century). The portraits‘ representational content and power disappears in an unsettling grotesque way in front of the viewer eye, while at the same time they start to look almost painterly and abstract. There is a quiet beauty of the destruction, as well as a politically critical but still ambiguous tone in this video. The process of destruction and thereby ghostly abstraction marks these now fragmented portraits as archeological sites. The artist’s act of pouring out chemicals over them seems to be - not simply a symbolic re-enactment of the assassination of the dictator (although there is quite some of this anarchistic energy and humor in Viera Gallos‘ works) - but foremost an allegorical impulse to keep the processes of memory critically active by deconstructing and transforming its notorious objects and sites.
„UNFINISHED BUSINESS was made for a show called „Contragolpe“ (back strike) for the anniversary of the failed assault to kill Pinochet. I also made it coincidentally the year Pinochet died, in 2006. The video is an expression of the latest feeling of the Chilean public about the dictator’s immunity and the victims’ impotency until he died. It is a domestic action, a somehow raw but essential revenge to his portrait that where everywhere as an official representation during the times of fake glory of his regime. The Clorox, a suitable cleaning appliance, dissolves portraits downloaded from the website of Pinochet’s still current foundation. It also works reversing the photographic concept of emulsion, where the image appears, making the picture actually disappear.“
Written by Anke Kempkes Gallery BROADWAY 1602
Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Video Art | 00:01:00
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Lucia Cristóbal León
Lucía remembers the summer in which she fell in love with Luis. The furniture whithin a bedroom is shaken and destroyed, meanwhile the charcoal Lucía appears and vanishes on the walls. Lucía is a stop motion animation.Edition: 3rd edition 2008 | Category: Animation | 00:03:50
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