“Chosen Memories: MoMA’s reinterpretation of Latin America’s colonial history through contemporary art”

In New York, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) offers a new reading of Latin America’s colonial past through the eyes of contemporary artists.

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A total of 65 works by 40 artists of different generations and styles reinterpret the region’s history told by cartographers, missionaries, scientists and adventurers.

Through painting, photography, sculpture or video, the exhibition “Chosen Memories”, until September 9, is part of the collection of the Venezuelan Patricia Phelps de Cisneros who donated it to the museum of New York.

Articulated around three themes, the artists offer new “readings of the history” of European colonialism in Latin America and the revitalization of its cultural heritage, according to the MoMA.

So with Lootingthe Guatemalan Regina José Galindo created a work with the gold inlays that a dentist placed in his molars and which, after extracting them again, remained as “imprints of his mouth that function as small sculptures of an imaginary archaeological museum“, in a metaphor for the violence of raw material extraction economies.

New landthe name of a map published in Europe in 1541, serves as the basis for the Dominican Firelei Báez to paint a ciguapa, a mythological female creature from her country, voluptuous and elusive which, juxtaposed with the diagram of the map, “embodies the fears and desires of European conquerors“to unknown cultures.

Argentinian Leandro Katz used the first lithographs made in the 1830s by explorers John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, who studied the Maya region that today occupies southern Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, to reconstruct their shipments.

Under the artistic name “Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis”, the Chileans Pedro Mardones Lemebel, a writer, and the poet Francisco Casas present their version of “Las dos Fridas” in an impressive photograph, alluding to the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907- 1954).

“History is a living organism”

A visitor observes the work of art Mother Kalunga by Cuban artist José Bedia, part of the “Chosen Memories” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) on 1is May.

Photo: AFP/VNA/CVN

The artists immersed themselves”in the past to repair histories of dispossession, reconnect with undervalued cultural legacies, and strengthen ties of kinship and belonging“, summarized in a press release the curator of Latin American art of the museum, the Argentine Inés Katzenstein.

“For example“, she added to AFP, “the works offer a critical look at colonialism“European.

For Brazilian photographer Rosangela Rennó, quoted by MoMA, “History is a living organism (…) constantly reviewed and reassessed“.

For the organizers of “Chosen Memories”, colonial structures continue to condition value systems around ancestral cultures, work and nature.

Because the “past is never completely past” et “is a fertile field of possibilities for the present“.

Some of what is on display at MoMA comes from the collection of M^me Phelps de Cisneros who donated 250 works to the museum for 25 years. In 2016, this Venezuelan, one of the biggest private collectors in the world, created an eponymous research institute dedicated to Latin American art.

The MoMa has more than 5,000 works of modern and contemporary art from this region.

AFP/VNA/CVN