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25/6/2008

Opening Maps

Bozar - Centre for Fine Arts, Bruxelles

curated by Alejandro Castellote

Contemporary Latin American Photography

After the first, successful edition of The Summer of Photography in 2006, the Centre for Fine Arts is presenting a new edition in 2008, along with 23 partners (including the FotoMuseum of the Province of Antwerp, Musée de la Photographie and the MACs). The purpose is to show diverse photography initiatives in a big event with a parallel programme and a joint communication plan. There is no central theme: all contemporary aspects of Belgian and international photography are possible. The programme features art photography, reportage, works from collections, fashion photography, competitions, urban photography, and photography workshops.

The Centre for Fine Arts proposes three projects in the framework of The Summer of Photography: Pôze II, a community arts project in Brussels, Discovering a World of Images, the first stop on a worldwide journey with the winners of the international competition Sony World Photography Awards 2008, and the exhibition Opening Maps: Contemporary Latin American Photography in collaboration with Instituto Cervantes. This exhibition presents a most complete survey of artists, themes and tendencies in contemporary Central American, South American and Caribbean photography. The exhibition is the result of years of research and collaboration between photographs, artists, critics, historians, and representatives of cultural institutions from all over Latin America. The Spanish commissioner, Alejandro Castellote, has gathered some 200 photographs.

The past few decades have been a flourishing period in Latin American art, even though this boom has been inconsistent, depending on the political and economic landscape in its approximately 25 countries. Due to a varying interest from North America and Europe, international art fairs and a growing volume of art works have recently contributed to the international success of artists who are normally heaped together as ‘Latin Americans’, even though their works are just as heterogeneous as the countries they come from. Consequently, this exhibition is not meant to show features linking these artists to their countries. Opening Maps leaves the usual themes in Latin American art aside, offering a platform for a large number of young, unknown photographers. The result is a voluminous, complex image of the contemporary statements in Latin American art (photography).

The exhibition Opening Maps features three ‘story lines’:

The Rituals of Identity

The portrait photography of the 18 Latin American photographers in this first part of the exhibition goes much further than the documentary portrait photography that represents individuals in their usual, expected cultural context. The photographers use new techniques including transpositions, editing, collages, typography, and digital manipulation. The subject’s body becomes a carrier of culture, a cult object transforming into a mask of (ethnic) symbols, such as language, history, magic, or even territory. The mutations and interactions between this new photography, the poses and the gestures of the individuals in the photographs create a totally different, complex image of (ethnic) identity in Latin America, not as an irreversible result of a historical evolution, but as a dynamic process of an individual, a group, or an entire population that can change and vary beyond the national borders.

Scenarios

In traditional photography, landscapes are usually quickly recognised by a number of characterising phenomena and space references that refer to a specific region or country. In Opening Maps the landscapes appear as deconstructions. They lose their concrete reference to a certain environment or city in Latin America, and instead show the correlations between concepts like private and public, personal and collective, inside and outside, two-dimensional and three-dimensional. Contemporary Latin American photographers seek for new ways to represent historical themes, such as landscapes and urban environments, all so important in the encoding of Latin American society. Contemporary environment photography distillates elements from the environment we live in, re-combining them into new scenarios. As a result, this photography tends to lose on the one hand its credibility as a model or as the perfect representation of a certain place, but on the other hand, it gives more contrast to the social entities.

Alternative Histories

Photography has always served as an extraordinary witness of history – whether it is History with a capital H, or people’s individual histories. Therefore, it is considered a document with a reliable representation of reality. Both the new image processing technologies with their transformations, manipulations or violations of historic reality, and the impertinence that they are used with, transform this perfect witness of history into an image that mainly serves as a means of persuasion, pressure, and social control. The photographs in this third part of Opening Maps are not limited to an uncritical representation, but try to contribute to a debate and a critical view of history and ideological systems. Until a few decades ago, historical photography in Latin America mainly featured images, subjected to strict selection criteria and censorship. A first change was noticed when new elements from reality were deemed worthy to be represented: heroic, shocking, narrative, and later, in contemporary iconography, also apparently banal and anti-heroic elements. Personal histories, biographies and stories of individuals’ daily experiences became valuable alternatives to the story of collective evolutions, national histories, or big international events. Today, the relationship between the photographer, the image, and what or who is being photographed, has become tighter and stronger: all three are important protagonists in a new historiography.

Participating photographers

Argentina: Marcelo Brodsky – López Marcos – Paula Luttringer - Julio Grinblatt – Esteban Pastorino – Gabriel Valansi - RES – Gustavo Frittegotto – Gerardo Suter Brazil: Mario Cravo Neto – Fernanda Magalhaes – Eustaquio Neves – Kenji Ota – Penna Prearo – Letitia Valverdes - Vik Muñiz – Miguel Rio Branco - Casio Vasconcellos Colombia: Jaime Ávila – José Alejandro Restrepo - Óscar Muñoz – Miguel Ángel Rojas Cuba: Arturo Cuenca – Eduardo Muñoz - Juan Carlos Alóm – Marta Maria Pérez Bravo Ecuador: Lucía Chiriboga - Manuel Piña Costa Rica: Jaime David Tischler Guatemala: Luis González Palma, Mexico: Maya Goded – Daniel Weinstock - Rubén Ortiz Torres – Tatiana Parcero Peru: Workshops: Guelatao, Fotokids, Venezuela and TAFOS – Milagros De la Torre, Philippe and Hare Gruenberg - Roberto Huarcaya – Cecilia Paredes Venezuela: Alexander Apóstol – Luis Molina-Pantin - Nelson Garrido

Opening june 26 2008

Image: Tatiana Parcero Portada

Co-production: Instituto Cervantes With the support of the Brussels Capital Region, the City of Brussels, SONY

Bozar - Centre for Fine Arts
Koningsstraat 10 - 1000 Brussels
Opening hours: Tuesdays > Sundays: 10:00 > 18:00; Fridays: 10:00 > 22:00
Tickets: euro 7,00; euro 12,00: combined tickets including also It’s not only Rock ’n’ Roll, Baby!

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