CUNY
BASTA! An Exhibition about Art and Violence in Latin America
On Now:
May 5, 2016 → Jul 15, 2016
05.05.16 → 07.15.16
ARTISTS
Ivan Argote
Marcelo Cidade
Regina Galindo
Aníbal López
Teresa Margolles
José Carlos Martinat
Yucef Merhi
Alice Miceli
Mondongo
Moris
Armando Ruiz
Giancarlo Scaglia
Javier Téllez
Juan Toro
CURATORS
Claudia Calirman
Isabela Villanueva

This three-fold collaboration with John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, included ISLAA's support of BASTA! An Exhibition about Art and Violence in Latin America (May 5–July 15, 2016) curated by Claudia Calirman and Isabel Villanueva at the Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery and its accompanying publication. ISLAA also supported the public programming of the exhibition, which included a symposium with the participation of scholars Estrellita B. Brodsky, Gustavo Buntinx, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, and Gabriela Rangel, as well as a panel discussion with artists Mondongo and Javier Téllez.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Ivan Argote

Iván Argote (b. 1983 in Bogotá, Colombia) is an artist and film director. Through his sculptures, installations, films and interventions, he questions our intimate relationship with others, institutions, power and belief systems. He develops strategies based on tenderness, affect and humour through which he suggests critical approaches to dominant historical narratives and attempts to decentralise them. In his interventions on monuments, large-scale installations and performances, Iván Argote proposes new symbolic uses of public space.
Works by the artist are included in the permanent collections of numerous prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Guggenheim Museum (New York, US); Centre Pompidou (Paris, France); ASU Art Museum (Phoenix, US); Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (Miami, US); Colección de Arte del Banco de la República (Bogotá, Colombia); Kadist (San Francisco, US); MACBA (Barcelona, Spain).

Marcelo Cidade

Marcelo Cidade(b. 1979, São Paulo) is an artist who works with the creation or modification of urban environments to produce new, often unexpected, and poetically expressive works and situations. His work inserts itself in the constant flux between the shared experience of public spaces and spheres, and our subjective interior space and experience. Through different aesthetic strategies, Cidade creates works that give expression to complex social conflicts and bring signifiers and situations from the street into spaces primarily dedicated to art, and vice versa.

Regina Galindo

Regina José Galindo (b. 1974) was born in Guatemala City. Her work has been included in group shows like Venice-Istanbul, Museum of Modern Art, Intanbul; Into Me, Out of Me, P.S.1, New York. and Kunst-Werke Berlin; MASH, Miami; Las Fronteras del Género, Zaragoza, Spain; Estrecho Dudoso, Teoretica, Costa Rica; MENS mankind, S.M.A.K., Belgium; Courants Alternatifs, PARVIS, Paris and Bordeaux, France; Eretica, Palermo, Italy; Il Potere delle Donne, Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea, Trento, Italy; Produciendo Realidad, Lucca, Italy; First Festival of Corporal Art, Caracas, Venezuela; She has been invited to participate in the Moscu Biennal 2007; I Bienal Arquitectura, Arte Paisaje Islas Canarias in 2006; III Biennale of Tirana, Albania in 2005; Venice Biennal in 2001 and 2005; II Biennal in Prague in 2005; and III Biennal in Lima, Peru in 2002. She won the Golden Lion Award for young artists for her participation in the Venice Biennal in 2005. She has published a monography of her work Regina José Galindo by VanillaEdizioni, and PrometeoGallery, Italy 2006, and the book of poetry Personal e Intransmisible, editorial Coloquia, Guatemala, 1999.

Aníbal López

Aníbal López (A1-53167) was born in 1964 in Guatemala, where he currently lived and worked until 2014 when he passed away. He was invited to participate in dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel. Lopez also had a solo exhibition at the Centro Cultural de España in Guatemala City (2011) and put on numerous performances over the years. Some of his international group exhibitions include the Bienal de Pontevedra (2010), the biennale in Porto Allegre (2007), the Prague Biennale (2003) and the Venice Biennale (2001), where he was awarded the Golden Lion as Best Young Artist.

Teresa Margolles

Teresa Margolles (b. 1963, Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico) has investigated the social and aesthetic dimensions of conflict, creating sculptural installations, photographs, films, and performances imbued with material traces of death for over twenty-five years. The artist’s work most often incorporates physical remnants of violent crimes resulting from political corruption and social exclusion—blood-stained sheets, glass shards from shattered windshields, bullet-ridden walls, or used surgical threads—whose victims are otherwise rendered invisible. Tapping into the restrained sensibilities of conceptualism and minimalism, Margolles inserts post-mortem matter typically obscured from public consciousness into the architectures of civic and cultural institutions. Filling a white-cube gallery space with a dense fog of vaporized water previously used to wash corpses, for example, or mounting a flag onto the facade of the Venice Biennale’s Palazzo Rota-Ivancich splattered with blood from homicides near the Mexico-U.S. border, Margolles transgresses normative boundaries to command attention and invoke accountability.

José Carlos Martinat

José Carlos Martinat (b. 1974, Lima, Peru) graduated from the Instituto Antonio Gaudí – Centro de la Fotografía. He studied sound design and interactive software and art. His recent group exhibitions include 7 Bienal do Mercosul (2009), 2nd Trienal Poli/Gráfica from San Juan (2009), MALI Contemporáneo at Museo de Arte de Lima (2009),Emergentespresented at LABoral in Gijón, Spain (2008) and at Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires, Santiago and Lima (2008-2009),10°00 S / 76°00 Wat Galeria Leme in São Paulo (2007),Doppelgänger: El doble de la Realidadat MARCO Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo, Spain (2007), VAE9 Festival Internacional de Video/Arte /Electrónico in Lima (2005), World Wide Video Festival in Amsterdam (2004),Vía Satélite. Panorama de la fotografía y video arte contemporáneo del Perú, latinoamerican itinerancy. He received the Incentive for New Productions Award in the Vida 7.0 Arte y Vida Artificial Competition Fundación Telefónica, Madrid, Spain (2004). The artist is represented by Galeria Leme in São Paulo and Revolver Galería in Lima. He lives and works in Lima.

Yucef Merhi

Yucef Merhi (b. 1977) studied Philosophy at Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas and The New School in New York. He and holds an MA in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University. A pioneering figure in the use of digital media in art, Merhi has produced a wide body of works that engage electronic circuits, computers, video game systems, touch screens, and other devices.

Alice Miceli

Alice Miceli is a Brazilian artist from Rio de Janeiro. Her work has been exhibited at the Sao Paulo Biennale, Nara Roesler Gallery in São Paulo, and Max Protetch Gallery in New York. She has also been shown in venues including Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo, the TRANSITIO_MX festival in Mexico City, the Transmediale festival in Berlin, and Documenta XII in Kassel, Germany. Residency awards include the MacDowell Colony, Bogliasco, Bemis, Djerassi, and the Dora Maar House. Miceli is the recipient of the 2014 PIPA Prize, and the 2015 Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation Grants & Commissions Award.

Mondongo

Mondongo is a collective of Argentinian artists: Agustina Picasso, Juliana Laffitte and Manuel Mendanha. All from Buenos Aires, they formed Mondongo in 1999 after studying art at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón.

Moris

Moris (b. 1978, Mexico City) attended the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts, La Esmeralda, National Institute of Fine Arts, and graduated with a BFA degree. His works have been displayed in various international locations, including the 9thBiennale of Havana, Cuba (2006), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2010), and Baro Galeria, Brazil (2012).

Giancarlo Scaglia

Giancarlo Scaglia (b. 1981) is an artist living and working in Peru. Scaglia's work seeks to reinterpret a number of events of the armed conflicts that took place in the 1980s and 1990s in Peru. His interest in recontextualizing these events within the field of art led him to question the origin of all that is avant-garde and to ask himself what determines whether an action or gesture is art or not.

Javier Téllez

Javier Téllez (b. 1969, Venezuela) lives and works in New York and Berlin. For almost two decades mental illness has been one of the main subjects of Téllez’ practice as an artist. Working often in collaboration with psychiatric patients, it is the aim of Téllez to produce films and videos that attempt to challenge the stereotypes associated with mental illness. As the scholar Michele Faguet stated, “[Téllez] engages in an ethical manner with communities of individuals who live outside the models of normative behavior that define the parameters of a ‘sane’ society but that are constantly shifting in relation to the ideological structures that determine this social order”. Important components of Téllez’ projects are further the specific social and political histories of the locations where the projects are developed, something which becomes apparent in the works of One Flew over the Void (Bala Perdida) (2005), O Rinoceronte de Dürer (Dürerʼs Rhinoceros) (2010), and Rotations (Prometheus and Zwitter) (2011).

Juan Toro

Juan Toro is a Venezuelan Photographer, who lives and works in Caracas. From 2008, Toro began his artistic project on violence. Since then he’s dedicated himself to registering all violent acts and its aftermath. Thus his work “Nadie se atreva a llorar…Dejen que ria el silencio” (No one dare cry…..Let silence laugh), that chronicles crime scenes, facts that have become very common and a part of the daily life of the Venezuelans. This work was exhibited for the first time in the frame of Photo España at the Cervantes Institute of Madrid in 2011, as it was part of the exposition “Peso y Levedad” (Weight and Levity). In 2013, Toro had his first solo show at the Organización Nelson Garrido, Caracas, Venezuela.

ABOUT THE CURATORS
Claudia Calirman

Claudia Calirman is Associate Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in the Department of Art and Music. Her areas of study are Latin American, modern, and contemporary art. She is the author ofBrazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles(Duke University Press, 2012), which received the 2013 Arvey Book Award by the Association for Latin American Art. She is a 2013 recipient of the Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation to write her second scholarly book on “women artists from Latin America from the 1970s.” She has published many articles including “Pop and Politics in Brazilian Art” (International Popexhibition catalogue, Walker Art Center, 2015), “Lygia Pape and Anna Maria Maiolino ‘Epidermic’ and Visceral Works” (Woman’s Art Journal, 2014), among others. She has curated several exhibitions in New York, includingAntonio Manuel: I Want to Act, Not Represent!(Americas Society, 2011) andBut enough about me—now let’s talk about my work: Artoons by Pablo Helguera(John Jay College, 2011). She is co-curating the exhibitionBasta!at the Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery at John Jay College (May 2016) and organizing an international symposium on “Art and Violence in Latin America Today.” She is the Director of the Art and Justice Fellowship Program at John Jay College and a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

Isabela Villanueva

Isabela Villanueva (b. 1979, Caracas) lives in New York. She received her BA in Latin American literature from the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello and a Diploma in French language and civilization from La Sorbonne in Paris. She also received her MLitt in history and art connoisseurship from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: 1860 to Present Day at the University of Cambridge. From 2006–11 she worked at Americas Society’s Art Gallery department, where she served as assistant curator to several exhibitions, includingAd Usum: To Be Used. An Exhibition of The Work of Pedro Reyes,Carlos Cruz-Diez: (In)formed by Color,Torrijos: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide,Dias and Riedweg… And It Becomes Something Else,Marta Minujín: Minucodes,Arturo Herrera: Les Noces, andFor Rent: Consuelo Castaneda.

The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) supports the study and visibility of Latin American art.
142 Franklin Street New York, NY 10013

Tue–Sat: 12–6 PM Sun–Mon: Closed

142 Franklin Street New York, NY 10013

Copyright © 2023 Institute for Studies on Latin American Art
The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) supports the study and visibility of Latin American art.

Tue–Sat: 12–6 PM Sun–Mon: Closed
SUBSCRIBE