Decolonizing the Canon: Latin American Art and Other Ways of Understanding its Exhibitions

ANDREA GIUNTA (AUTOR)

Berlin

Conferencia; The Idea of the Global Museum; 2016

Hamburger Bahnhof ? Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany

During its almost two centuries of existence, the history of modern and contemporary art has been told from the Euro-North American perspective, fixing its narration. According to this scheme modern art began in Europe, mainly with artists living in Paris (with episodes in Italy, Germany, England, Spain, Russia, Holand), and its center moved to New York, after the Second World War. The strength of this story remains active and decisive. Even in books on contemporary art, history always begins in the Europe-North America axis and then shifts to other parts of the world as reverbs, echoes, offsets, or local histories. Similarly, as it is well known, this history has been predominantly made by artists that society and its institutions identified as male (regardless of how they considered themselves). It?s a history of the centers, patriarchal and partial, that has erased whatever did not fit its standards. Although things are changing, the necessity persists for more radical acts of indiscipline that give way to new questions and new paths for new knowledge. Indiscipline, not as an act of rebellion, but as the exercise to abolish and reconsider the frames of knowledge that we are comfortable with. This is what we look for when we talk about a global world: to see beyond what we already know of the hegemonic history of art, and to understand new objects, realities, and knowledge. The two exhibitions that I will refer to in this presentation are connected to this concern. It is a perspective that I have discussed in a number of essays focusing on the concept of simultaneous avant-gardes, meant to replace the idea of peripheral or decentered avant-gardes; and in a series of essays analyzing the iconographic turn produced in the work of artists (identified by society and institutions as women, regardless of how they represent themselves) mainly between 1960s and 1980s.I will first refer to VERBOAMERICA, the exhibition I co-curated with Agustin Perez Rubio (artistic director of the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires, MALBA), in which we re-interpreted the permanent collection of Malba, to offer an interpretation that puts aside the Euro-American styles in order to focus on the experiences that the works of these artists narrate. So we do not look to the nomenclature of the established art history styles, but on the one that refers to the simultaneous styles generate by Latin American artists. This exhibition opened at the Malba in September 2016.In my second case study, I will analyze the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, co-curated with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill (independent curator), and focused on the work by Latin American artists that working primarily on the representations of the body. A body that was taboo and so far represented from a patriarchal perspective: I analyze these works considering the iconographical turn they introduced in XX Century Art. The exhibition will open at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in September 2017.