This research aims to analyze the contact and learning routes of artists such as Rafael Yela Günther and Alfredo Gálvez Suárez with great exchange in Mexico and the United States; both moved to other urban centers to study and train, and later returned to Guatemala to
develop projects that synthesized their transnational trajectories.
In this research project I intend to investigate the networks formed by artists and intellectuals from Argentina, Bolivia and Perú between 1912 and 1929. The constant movement of agents through the Southern and Central Andes, the creation of cultural magazines of transnational reach and the visual imaginaries centered in the region are indicators that point to the existence of a cultural process that developed through the three mentioned countries.
Sebastián Eduardo Dávila’s postdoctoral research project connects the concept of syncretism to contemporary art production and artists from the Americas. What understanding of syncretism needs to be crafted in order to do justice to the entangled histories, as well as to the spirit and intention embedded in art practices where Indigenous and Afro-Diasporic saberes (“wisdom, knowledges”) are transmitted under dominant idioms, like contemporary art formats and further conventions in biennials, art fairs, and museums?
Disobedient Bodies seeks to investigate the power ascribed to the iconography of the pregnant body as a site of the intersection of culture, history, politics, and religion within Latin America. It examines how images of pregnancy are deployed, praised, and politicised in a time – from the late 1970s – when the body becomes the focus of art practices inside and outside Latin America.
In the search for practices and practitioners that encompass what I have been calling ‘sky lifting’ manners, with emancipatory and critical perspectives as well as other ways of being, I chose the important figure of Abdias Nascimento. His thinking and doings have historically built the ground for deviant existences and art practices to take place. The restoration of black Brazilians’ dignity is central to the intellectual, dramaturg, politician and artist.
The research explores the role of cultural productions at a time of increasing unionisation and politicisation of workers’ movements during the 1950s-80s in Peru. Through the study of a group of working-class intellectuals, poets and artists active during those decades, the project examines how their visual and poetic productions contributed to the circulation and discussion of radical political ideas, to the development of a class consciousness within the workers’ and grassroots movements and, ultimately, to the construction of an image of the worker and, therefore, of the Peruvian working class.
Responding to the thematic field of “History,” this session will discuss the importance of transregional approaches in art history today. Informed by recent studies on networks of artistic solidarity during the Cold War, this session will explore how manifestations of artistic solidarity in the 1960s and 1970s can allow us to articulate a more horizontal approach to the discipline.
This project explores the vital role of letters as cultural objects in colonial times. Letters were instrumental in maintaining Spanish colonial dominance over distant territories. This study examines the social, and cultural dimensions of letters, tracing their journey through various channels and spaces in viceregal Lima (1580-1650).
The German Center for Art History (DFK Paris, part of the Max Weber Foundation – German Humanities Institutes Abroad), the...
This project analyzes how between the 1950s and 1970s, certain Central American artists engaged in a large network of local and international cultural spaces (public and private) that were devoted to the promotion of Latin American modern art. These artists were engaged in a complex circuit of art exhibits, art competitions such as biennales and lectures amongst others to occupy space in the larger debate of what Latin American Art was supposed to be.
In different moments throughout Art History, some artists made use of walking with aesthetic purposes. However, the 21st century seems to be the moment when walking as performance congeals, adding value to performance as a transdisciplinary coupling of art and citizenship.
Following Witold Gombrowicz’s existential map, extending from Central Europe via Latin America to Western Europe, I will try to trace the contours of his self-identification, volatile because shaped by different places and orders of time (cultural, historical and diaristic)
Lucy’s dissertation project titled “The Official Field: Visual Arts and Cultural Policy During the Military Dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile” undertakes a comparative study of the construction of an official discourse about the visual arts in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile during the military dictatorships between the 1960s and 1980s.
At the end of the 1960s, the Brazilian literary critic Antonio Candido published “Literature and underdevelopment”, an article which quickly became a classic of Latin American cultural studies.
Between the late 1960s and 1980s, doubts about progress and the means of modernization had grown in Brazil. The consolidation of the dictatorship after 1968, the failure of revolutionary movements and the difficulties to challenge international structures of power introduced a significant shift in the way time was thought and experienced.
