Ethics and Ethnicity in Latin American Contemporary Art

About

In this presentation, titled The Blood of History Doesn't Dry: Ethics and Ethnicity in Latin American Contemporary Art, Guatemalan curator and political theorist Pablo José Ramírez will speak about Latin American artists operating in situations where enunciation is difficult or uncomfortable, or whose practices challenge dominant or official discourses that often sanitise forms of cultural production that don’t fit with a white mestizaje or neoliberal-multicultural worldview.  

Focusing on indigenous cultures, ideas of community and problems of language, rituals and borders, Pablo will discuss his previous curatorial projects, from Guatemala Despues to the 19th Biennial de Arte Paiz and The Transmodern Dictionary. He will also touch upon art’s relationship to new approaches to activism and memory in Latin America, such as the Zapatista movement in Mexico and the Diablada de Pillaro in Ecuador. Through these examples, Pablo will describe his attempts to think up exhibition models that combine art objects with history writing and the specificities of artists’ material cultures.

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From 2010 to 2014 Pablo was Executive Director of Ciudad de la Imaginación, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. In 2015 he was a jury member for the 8th Inquieta Image prize at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Costa Rica and for the 2nd edition of the Contextos Volcánicosopen call at  TEOR/éTica. He co-curated the 19th Bienal de Arte Paiz in 2014 and took part in the Curatorial Program Research’s South American edition this year. He is currently undertaking research in the Andean and Mesoamerican regions, focusing on pre-Hispanic and colonial appropriation in contemporary art.