The Body of Memory (El Cuerpo de la Memoria)

About

Janet Toro's performance series El cuerpo de la memoria (The body of memory), rekindles both individual and collective consciousness of the coup d'etat in Chile – that took place 50 years ago. 

This exhibition of photography and video documentation of performances refers back to 1999, when the artist presented 90 performance-installations as part of the second Biennale of Young Artists that was held at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Chile. Walking barefoot for kilometres and subjecting herself to physical constraints, Janet Toro pointed out sites of political detention and torture implemented during the civil-military dictatorship in Chile. Pushing at the limits of her body, Toro experienced 62 methods of torture, that recollected the horrors employed by the dictatorial apparatus to suppress and obliterate anything deemed a threat to their project. Such methods are the basis of Toro’s radical works. 

Janet Toro is a Chilean visual artist. She studied Art at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Chile and was a member of the APJ (Young Plastic Artists) group who carried out various political urban art actions, graffiti, murals during the military dictatorship. Alongside a significant career of exhibitions and performances, her work was featured in the group exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960-1985, by curators Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta, exhibited at the Hammer Museum Los Angeles, Brooklyn Museums New York and the Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2017/18. Her works are part of the permanent collection of the Phoenix Art Museum. Her work is a visual reflection, and a bodily and material intervention in human existence. 

Supported by Peltz Gallery and CILAVS (Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies) at Birkbeck, University of London. Also supported by Centre for Postcolonial Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London and the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Chile).