Space to Dream: Recent art from South America

Space to Dream: Recent Art from South America
Auckland Art Gallery
Until September 18

The first image that one sees in the Space to dream exhibition is an upsidedown South America by the artist Joaquín Torres Garcia, created in 1943. The work was intended to assert the place of South America as having its own distinctive culture and comes from the same impetus that has seen the upside down map which puts New Zealand at the top of the world, no longer “down under.”

Ii is not just that cartographic idea of being of lesser consequence than northern countries but also the sense of being inferior in culture. Just as New Zealand sees Australia as an older, bossier sibling, so too do many in South America see North America as dominating them as well as the inferiority felt towards the homelands of Spain and Portugal.

Then there is the annoying tendency of the rest of the world referring to the US as being America, as though it owns the word. This gives rise to the series of works by Alfredo Jaar which questioned assumptions of which countries comprise “America” with his “Logo for America” presented in Times Square in 1987.

There is also the work “Ekko” by Bernardo Oyarzun featuring an indigenous South American figure weighed down with all the trappings of western capitalism and excess – shopping bags, cameras, phones, the figure a metaphor for the whole of the subcontinent and its feeling of being subservient to overseas domination.

This ambivalence about culture and its roots as well as an exploration of what constitutes the cultures of the various South American states is one of the themes running through the exhibition which is the first comprehensive exhibition of its kind to be generated in Australasia with the work of 41 artists and collectives from the 1960s to the present day.

The exhibition is themed around ideas of origins, histories, revolution, resistance, poetics, popular culture and new horizons. These themes weave throughout and offer a way of understanding the diversity, breadth and depth of visual culture of South America as well as providing insights into the intersection of politics and social change.

The dislocation from Europe is seen in the playful work “Rebel Evita” by Alejandr Thornton and Paula Pellejero in which the opening scene of The Sound of Music with Julia Andrews singing about the hills being alive with the sound of music is dubbed with “Don’t Cry for me Argentina” from the soundtrack of Evita.

Some of the works reveal aspects of South American history that few will be aware of, such as the video by Bolivian artist Joaquin Sanchez “Line of Water” which refers to the wars that land ocked Bolivia has had with Paraguay and Chile, which have meant losing access to the Atlantic and the Pacific.

There are several large installations, the most impressive of which is Ernesto Neto’s “Just like drops in time, nothing”; a work of stretched membranes creating anthropomorphic structures linking human shapes with other natural forms and organic architecture. Bulbous suspended shapes containing large quantities of fragrant spices swell the fabric in voluptuous, almost bodily, forms that fill the gallery space with an aromatic intensity.

One of the other large installations is by Maximo Corvalan-Pinchiero, which is a reference to the many Chilean individuals, “the missing” who disappeared under an oppressive regime. The work consists of bundles of bone, fluorescent tubes, tubes of running water, electronic connections and wiring. These are suspended over a tank of water which pumps water through the bundles, as though it is a vast organism. This reanimation of the bones is both a memorial to and a reimaging of those lost individuals.

There are a couple of interesting sets of photographs including Juan Manel Echararria’s “Silence Series” where he has documented a number of classrooms in schools which have been destroyed as a result of communities being displaced by violence in Colombia. The artist has focused on the large blackboards in the classrooms which, in some cases, are all that remain, the last vestige of the notion of the education and social cohesion of a community. The blackboards, which are like abstract artworks in some cases, bear the original traces of writing while others have faded or even disappeared.

While most of the works take on big issues with impressive constructions and installations there are also the whimsical tiny sculptures of Liliana Porter such as “Man with a Pickaxe” where the small figure mounted on a cube of wood has hacked away at the gallery wall, an emblem of the artist trying to make an impression.

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