With:
Angie Bonino
Andrés Burbano
Ximena Cuevas
Edgar Endress
Iván Esquivel (Plaztikk)
Kátia Lund
Gustavo Romano
Eduardo Villanes
Alvaro Zavala
“Nueva / Vista” presents a selection of award-winning video tapes and installations by Latin America’s most renowned video artists, from Mexico to Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Peru.
José-Carlos Mariátegui, curator of the exhibition, is the director of the international video festival Alta Tecnología Andina (ATA) in the Peruvian capital Lima, which has contributed a great deal to the development and dissemination of electronic media and video art in Peru and Latin America. The ATA Festival took place for the sixth time in 2002. In addition to video works from all over the world, it increasingly presents local productions from Peru’s growing video scene, which “Nueva / Vista” is showing in Germany for the first time.
Video art is perhaps more suited to react artistically to social changes and political events than any other medium, as numerous works at (d)OCUMENTA 11 demonstrate. “Nueva / Vista” also presents a “new view” of post-colonial Latin America, centring questions of one’s own identity, historical origins and Latin America’s eventful history.
The approaches of the Peruvian artists range from the reduced graphic works of Iván Esquivel (or “Plaztikk”) to the documentary-style political narrative style of Eduardo Villanes to an artificial, minimalist formal language in the work of Angie Bonino. However, the artists are united by their examination of recent political developments in Peru. Alvaro Zavala (or “Castor Andino”) in turn critically questions the tourist-folkloric “images” that continue to shape our image of Peru today in his “Andean videos”.
The Mexican artist Ximena Cuevas, of whose videotapes the Museum of Modern Art in New York owns a selection, humorously takes us on a fictional journey through Mexico City. Meanwhile Andrés Burbano, professor of video art and new media in Bogotá, shows Colombia’s capital in a surreal, hectically edited composition. Edgar Endress deals with the time of the military dictatorship in Chile from a childlike perspective, while the well-known Brazilian film director Kátia Lund uses the stylistic device of the video clip (for the Brazilian group “O Rappa”) in her award-winning video tape “In My Soul” (which has received several MTV awards) to address the poverty and increasing violence in the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Finally Gustavo Romano, Argentina’s most renowned media artist, brings us back to ourselves and the question of our identity with his installation “Small Private Worlds”.