“A country with a future”, a sound installation by the Peruvian artist José Luis Martinat (with extensive international experience) has just inaugurated the Buenos Aires headquarters of VIgil González, an important Latin American gallery.
Vigil González, in the heart of downtown Buenos Aires, is a new gallery dedicated to contemporary art with offices in Cuzco and Santo Domingo. It has just been inaugurated with “A country with a future”, sound installation by José Luis Martinat Peruvian artist born in Lima in 1974.
Several folding tables with old radios or Winco devices on which vinyl records spin that play, in a monotone voice, repetitive slogans from political campaigns: among them, the great transformation “together let’s do the great task-together let’s make the change-let’s build hope” . I mean, the repetition of a speech loaded with slogans and promises no matter what country it is.
On the walls hang supports of velvet, a fabric used by the European elite, also widely used by painters but which over time was syncretized into Andean costumes for carnival. On them, in both black and red, Martinat draws with a laser the architecture of the spaces where the candidates debated before the elections. The spaces of Donald Trump, Barack Obama and several Latin American leaders appear, as the artist tries to reinterpret the political and social complexity.
New exhibition of art and politics
According to the text that accompanies the exhibition, “the installation invites viewers to confront the depoliticizing effect of the candidates’ speech. This criticism, we consider, is absent from this installation that needs clarification from Martinat: “I do not seek with my work to support this or that sector or give answers to the problems of contemporary democracies.”. It merely presents the problem.
There is another installation of three bricks “The Last Judgment”: the chosen ones, a work from 2021 that according to the same text “establishes a dialogue with the triptych “The Last Judgment” that is in the cathedral of Lima (1625-1630), by Vicente Carducho “by connecting the precarious construction materials with the religious imaginary of colonization.” If you do not know these data, the viewer is left out of this exhibition and the intention of the artist who is dedicated to the study of political speeches and the visuality of political power, the relationship between the electoral vote and emotionality.
Martinat lives and works in Sweden. She studied at the School of Photography and Film at the University of Gothenburg, she completed a Master of Arts at Mälmo Fine Art Academy. He exhibited at the Telefónica Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lima, in Cambridge, at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, at the MOMA in New York and at the Tate Modern in London.. As a Peruvian emigrant in Sweden he is constantly in dialogue with the field of Latin American contemporaneity.
Another of the works “Faith, credit and future” (2021) consists of a polypropylene bag fabric that Martinat gathers in the markets of Lima and asked a traditional family of embroiderers, the Grados, to embroider words without any punctuation and in circles, for example, “Sinerrorslipcompliancepunishment”“Salvationsecurityhelp”, “Wordpromiseproposal”
An exposition of a conceptual order, arid, that calls for explanations if one wants to “enter into it” and as we read in the text that accompanies it, “requires a state of alert.” (Av. Roque Sáenz Peña 628 4° I. Wednesday to Friday from 3 to 7 p.m. Closing in March. Free admission).
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
