Carlos Leppe identifies the body, fragmented and bruised, as the receptor of violent social wounds inflicted by Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. These works were shown in an exhibition entitled Reconstruccion de escena (Reconstruction of a Scene), which also included works based on photographs of him posing in uncomfortable positions that suggest acts of violence. […]
Category Archives: The Edge of Things: Dissident Art under Repressive Regimes
Lleno de Sonrisas serias
Dalila Puzzovio emerged as a young artist in Buenos Aires in the early 1960s, before Jual Carlos Ongania’s repressive military regime (1966-70). The plaster casts were given to her by a friend who worked at a hospital. Each cast holds a story of a fracture that is unknown to the viewer, yet offers a precise […]
Anteproyecto de espacio represivo
Trained as an architect, Horacio Zabala examines the physical structures –particularly prisons and jails — that serve authoritarian systems. Espacio represivo recontextualized the punitive space of the prison inside the gallery. The architectural model, preliminary drawing. And photograph on view describe the original installation, which was constructed to human scale at the Centro de Arte […]
Habito/Habitante (Habit/Inhabitant)
Against the cultural and political framework of the dictatorship in Brazil (1964-85), women artists, oppressed by both patriarchal society and military power, produced experimental artworks that radically changed how the body was represented. Martha Araujo began creating what she called “performatic objects” during the country’s transition to democracy in the mid-1980s. These wearable textile pieces […]
The Edge of Things: Dissident Art under Repressive Regimes
What is art for? Can it have a political function by making visible what has been erased or disappeared? During a time of violence and political repression, artists from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile questioned their role in society and the purpose of art itself. Expressing resistance to coercive military dictatorships, they navigated fluid lines between […]
Considero mi cuerpo (I Consider My Body)
In a climate of social and political repression, where bodies of citizens were targets of state violence, the body of the artist became a political arena that reflected the wounds of a society in crisis. The text in spanish reads as follows: “I consider my body (the body of the artist), as receptor and sender […]
Sleep Sanctuary
there are four walls floor and ceiling four walls floor and ceiling we enter an environment that has four walls floor and ceiling the wall to the right is equal to the floor the wall to the left is equal to the floor the wall in front is equal to the floor the wall behind […]
Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis
These photographs document one of the first public actions performed by the artistic collective Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis (The Mares of the Apocalypse). Here, a nude Pedro Lemebel and Francisco Casas ride a mare into the University of Chile alongside three poet friends. Lemebel recalls that certain fields of study in the university were denied […]
Libro internacional
Libro internacional is a collection of works by various international artists, including Guillermo Deisler and Graciela Gutierrez Marx, sent to Edgardo Antonio Vigo via the postal system. Vigo began the three-volume mail art project in 1976, a year of political and personal significance in which the Argentine military coup d’etat occured and the artist’s son, […]
Arte Correio (Mail Art)
Paulo Bruscky was part of an international network of artists working performance, painting, sculpture, poetry, experimental music, and correspondance art, or mail art. Mail art uses stamps, seals, telegrams, and envelops as mediums to make artworks, which one then sends through the mail to friends and colleagues, potentially all over the world. Under oppressive regimes, […]