ART: An Argentine state of mind at the OAS Museum
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If every territory is subjective and each subject is a territory apart, the exhibition of 33 Argentine artists up now at the Art Museum of the Americas explores not only the physical geography of their vast Southern Cone country but also its “geographies of the mind.”
The show includes artists from various corners of Argentina a number of different artistic genres and styles. Thematically, curator Fernando Farina has sorted the pieces into three categories: Habitat, Culture, and Religion. There are portraits of European immigrants and ritualistic imagery that references the country’s indigenous populations, its historical process and globalization.
Carla Colombo’s two large format photographs of “whites” lying naked in the northern part of Argentina known as the Chaco, the traditional home of indigenous groups, makes reference to the arrival of British colonizers who exploited the people and their land.
Arturo Aguilar’s portrait, “Pieta,” of two women lying naked together on seat covered in silver and red silk, one pressing against the other’s chest, displays an act both of intimacy and innocence. Aguilar, who worked in theater and literature before switching to visual art, says he sought to achieve a natural scene “filled with sensuality and eroticism.”
“My conception of the arts has to do with the constructing of a poem, understanding that this is a form of expression that surmounts the formal and the symbolic. The poetry in it is about tearing down conventions,” Aguilar, who hails from San Juan in northeastern Argentina, said at the opening reception earlier this spring.
He was one of several artists who accompanied the traveling exhibition to the United States with the support of el Fondo Nacional de Las Artes,” the Argentine government’s arts foundation. The exhibition started in New York and will continue into Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago after its Washington run.
Farina says the exhibition has both inward- and outward-looking goals.
“It is really important for the Argentinean artists to have access to the scene in the United States,” he says. But the show also established an artist-to-artist dialogue about the “particular problems of the different regions, provinces, cities; and how to establish relations and find spaces to meet so that geographical limitations are removed.”
Territories and Subjectivities: Contemporary Art from Argentina will be on exhibition through July 7 at Art Museum of the Americas, 201 18th St, Washington, DC 20006,Tuesday –Sunday from 10am-5pm.
–Edwin Martinez
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