The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) is delighted to announce the opening of the exhibition The Counter-Public Sphere in the Condor Years, curated by Nicolás Guagnini, in its New York City space. This event marks the second installment of ISLAA’s new on-site exhibitions program, whose inaugural series features guest curators and focuses on conceptual art movements across Latin America.
The Counter-Public Sphere in the Condor Years assembles key works of South American contestatory public art from 1968 to 1979: a flag by Antonio Dias (Brazilian) and documentation of actions by Horacio Zabala (Argentine), Lotty Rosenfeld (Chilean), and CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte, Chilean), a group comprising Raúl Zurita, Fernando Balcells, Diamela Eltit, Lotty Rosenfeld, and Juan Castillo.
The exhibition foregrounds a historical moment inseparable from political repression and brutality, which gave rise to symbolic and often surreptitious modes of artistic production. Throughout South America, military dictatorships rose and fell...with backing from the Cold War–era Operation Condor, a US foreign policy platform referenced in the show’s title, whose disastrous consequences transformed daily life—and contemporary art practices. Where artists could not explicitly represent violent realities, they turned to allusive and public interventions to mount dissent. As such, the exhibition invokes Alexander Kluge’s notion of the “counter-public sphere,” a critical response to Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the “public sphere” of social life, to describe artworks that undermine authoritarian control through indirect but publicly visible means.
ISLAA is proud to offer an accompanying publication with essays by Nicolás Guagnini and Tobi Maier, which is available at our space and as a PDF download. We are also pleased to share copies of Horacio Zabala’s 300 metros de cinta negra para enlutar una plaza pública 1972–2012, a hardbound bilingual book documenting one of the exhibition’s featured artworks.
ISLAA’s inaugural exhibition series and its related publications integrate with our extensive archival holdings of resources on Latin American conceptualism. Relevant to the current exhibition, our library includes materials from the Argentine art organization CAyC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), in which Horacio Zabala participated. Previously, the archives of Mexican artist Ulises Carrión generated our first on-site exhibition, Ulises Carrión: The Big Monster, curated by Aimé Iglesias Lukin, in 2019. ISLAA welcomes curators and researchers to utilize our institutional resources toward producing new exhibitions and original scholarship on Latin American art.
The Counter-Public Sphere in the Condor Years will be on view at ISLAA from October 15, 2020, through January 15, 2021. Visits are by appointment only, and guests are required to follow COVID-19 precautions while on-site. To schedule a viewing, please visit the appointment page.
About the Curator
Argentine-born, New York–based artist and writer Nicolás Guagnini has exhibited worldwide. His artwork is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires and São Paulo, the Philara Collection in Düsseldorf, and other private and public collections. He is a cofounder of the experimental film company Union Gaucha Productions, whose films are in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, and the Stuki Museum in Poland. Guagnini has published his writing in October, Artforum, Texte Zur Kunst, and exhibition catalogues for the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among other places. He has curated exhibitions at the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas in Buenos Aires and at the Museum of Modern Art, Miguel Abreu Gallery, Bortolami Gallery, and Orchard in New York.
About ISLAA’s Exhibitions Program
ISLAA is proud to present its new exhibitions program on modern and contemporary Latin American art. This initiative continues ISLAA’s mission of advancing scholarship on art from Latin America. It consists of an interrelated series of physical exhibitions in ISLAA’s New York City gallery space and online presentations on its website. Guest curators are invited to draw from ISLAA’s library, archive, and graphic arts collection to develop original research and realize new exhibitions that consider underexamined figures, areas, and periods. This program seeks to foster curatorial innovation within the field and to offer scholars, curators, and arts professionals the opportunity to realize exceptional projects that will generate further interest in modern and contemporary Latin American art.
About ISLAA
The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) was established in 2011 in order to increase the visibility of Latin American art on a global scale. Since its creation, it has played an international role in fostering advanced research in this field. ISLAA sponsors lectures and symposia given and organized by renowned scholars, contemporary artists, and graduate students. It supports publications that include academic volumes, exhibition catalogues, and artists’ books, as well as groundbreaking exhibitions on modern and contemporary Latin American art.
Entrada actualizada el el 15 oct de 2020
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