Pacific Standard Time: Video Art from Latin America

About

Originally shown at LAXART (Los Angeles) in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute (GRI), Video Art in Latin America surveys groundbreaking achievements and important thematic tendencies in Latin American video art from the 1960s until today. The emergence of video art in Latin America is marked by staggered and multiple points of development across more than a dozen artistic centers over a period of more than 25 years. The earliest experiments with video in Latin America began in Argentina and Brazil in the 60s and 70s, respectively. In the late 1970s artists in Colombia, Mexico, and Puerto Rico began to use video. Artists in Chile, Cuba, and Uruguay took up the medium in the 1980s and the 1990s and 2000s saw video art movements emerging in Ecuador, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.

“In the latter part of the 20th century, early portable video equipment, in particular the Portapak, represented a decentralized media outlet for voicing opposition. At this time, video artists positioned the body as the site of expression in traumatic political contexts,” said co- curator Elena Shtromberg. “Contemporary video artists in Latin America are continuing to pursue social themes, exploring ideas about gender, ethnic, and racial identity as well as the consequences of social inequality, ecological disasters and global violence.

BIO:
Elena Shtromberg is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Utah. She specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American visual culture, with a specific focus on Brazil and the U.S.-Mexico border region. Her book, “Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s” (University of Texas Press, 2016) explores visual forms of critique and subversion during the height of Brazilian dictatorship by tracing how the encounter of artistic practice with information and systems theories redefined the role of art in society. Her interdisciplinary research interests extend to gender and media studies, cultural studies, as well as communications, geography and postcolonial theory. She has been the recipient of grants from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council and DAAD, among others. During her research leave in 2011-12 she was a guest scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. She has also curated a number of exhibitions, the latest among them a co-curated survey entitled “Video Art in Latin America” which opened in September 2017 at LAXART, an alternative art space in Los Angeles, part of the Getty Foundation’s initiative PST: LA/LA. She is now working on a co-edited volume, “Encounters in Video Art of Latin America” (Getty Publications, 2020) and a scholarly monograph on the role of historical memory in video art titled “Fugitive Memories”.
 

To find out more, visit our website: http://momentumworldwide.org/momentum-artist-residencies/elena-shtromberg/

To download the PDF of the catalogue, click here: http://momentumworldwide.org/wp-content/uploads/VALA-Video-Art-Latin-America-Catalogue.pdf