Artlink employed the skills and knowledge of Latin American visual art specialist Rebecca Breen to curate this unique exhibition which was presented at Fort Dunree 3rd October – 30th October 2009. This exhibition was realised with the help and aid of Daros Latin America.
‘Colombia contemporánea’ brought the most innovative of contemporary Colombian visual production to Fort Dunree. This is the first time an exhibition space has been dedicated to exclusively Colombian art in Ireland and it followed from the hugely successful survey of contemporary Latin American art at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2005 (‘Las horas / The Hours: Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America’, curated by Sebastián López).
This exciting exhibition featured the video installations of three representative Colombian artists who were gaining increasing international exposure, furthered in no small part by the Artlink exhibition: Oscar Muñoz, Juan Manuel Echavarría, and Rosemberg Sandoval. Their respective works foreground qualities not usually associated with Colombian art – such as irony, wit, and the suggestion of a shared humanity – and although the themes which run through this exhibition inevitably encompass Colombia’s on-going internal conflict, witnessing to traumatic experience, displacement, and collective memory and/or amnesia in the face of all these, the exhibition equally redirects the focus from these more conventional readings of Colombian artistic production. It highlights, instead, the some of the different conceptual strategies which are employed by Colombian artists to provide sardonic commentary and make oblique reference to contemporary cultural contexts and histories, both those expressly Colombian and those more universal. In short, the exhibition emphasises ‘art from a contemporary Colombian perspective.’
Faced with the potential problem of isolating Colombian art (or, indeed, any one geographically-defined art history) in an increasingly global age, ‘Colombia contemporánea’ also focuses on the specificities of its local context and it is highly significant that this exhibition took place at Fort Dunree. Much like the history of Colombian art – and Latin American art more broadly –, the historically and politically charged site on the Inishowen Peninsula has been a ‘contested space’ and, even today, it is marked by successive waves of occupation of one kind or another (from military to cultural). Similarly, the four works which comprise this exhibition can be seen to bear the traces of past and present, personal and collective, local and international histories, cultures, and politics.
The four featured works were:
Oscar Muñoz, Re/trato [Portrait / I Retreat], 2003.
Single channel video, colour, silent
Juan Manuel Echavarría, Bocas de ceniza [Mouths of Ash], 2003.
Single channel video, colour, sound
Juan Manuel Echavarría, Guerra y pa’ [War and Peace], 2001.
Single channel video, colour, sound
Rosemberg Sandoval, Baby Street, 1998.
Single channel video (performed in ‘Arte y violencia en Colombia desde 1948’, Bogotá, 1998), colour, sound.
The idea of cultural exchange also played a crucial role as part of the curatorial framework of ‘Colombia contemporánea’ and the exhibition was motivated by a desire to create real situations of connection, contribution, and audience engagement