main exhibition / 7 sep 12 oct 2002
Victor Vazquez ©
The main exhibition is held in the Fries Museum, where work is shown by photographers from the Wider Caribbean area. The emphasis is on contemporary photographers, that especially use constructed photography as a means to investigate their culture.
It is often but a narrow line between fact and fiction. Jorge Albán walks this thin dividing line when he combines intimate images of a domestic nature with apparently disconnected statements. The texts do not elucidate the photographs. Rather, the 'impossible monologues' reinforce the disorienting effect of Albán's close-ups of everyday acts.
Albán chiefly seems to allude to role patterns in family life. But the peculiar combinations of words and images call up all sorts of new associations, consciously and subconsciously.
EL LIBRO OSCURO (The Dark Book) is a visual investigation into the symbolism in Cuban culture. With installations of everyday materials, Alom gives new content to old understandings that arise from Cuban myths, aesthetics and social norms and values. Alom does not so much tell a story with his photographs, as create these poetic images to make a personal gesture.
Seeing yourself in a mirror can be an encounter, or even a confrontation. The mirror reflects everything down to the smallest detail, beautifies nothing, and shows us our true face.
With FRENTE AL ESPEJO (In front of the mirror) Rebeca Alpízar investigates what are various facets of herself and at the same time but one. Her appearance changes with her clothing, and she can change character. But that indicates nothing about her real 'I'.
Alexander Apóstol is part of a younger generation that does not shun self-critique of the Latin American identity and prevailing cliches. For instance, in the photo series PASATIEMPOS (Pastime, 1998) he exposes the archetypical 'Latin macho' image, as that is dictated by men's magazines. Apóstol's latest project, RESIDENTE PULIDO (Polished Flats, 2002) is a follow-up on this theme. The rationalistic/modernist architecture dates from the 1950s, when the economies of Venezuela and other Latin American countries grew explosively, fueled by oil production. With digital techniques Apóstol has retouched out all the entrances, and covered their outside walls with glass or porcelain. His intervention turns the fifty-year-old flats into impenetrable monuments. The massive monoliths not only remind one of better, now bygone times; for Apóstol the buildings, with their closed but fragile exterior are also a metaphor for the arrogant, masculine male.
What Gustavo Araujo particularly remembers from his childhood are the family weekends at the sea. What has stuck with him the most are the objects that seemed to move of themselves. Windmills, flags and waves still evoke a feeling of nostalgia for him. He combines photographic sequences of these objects with images from his personal environment. Movement, points of view and the passage of time play a large role in these billboard-like surveys. These are cinematic aspects, but Araujo offers us something that film can not: he shows the images simultaneously, so that viewers can reconstruct their own succession and story line from them.
Albert V. Chong belongs to the group of contemporary photographers who no longer take photos, but make photos. Most of his work is constructed and assembled. In it he combines old family photos with objects such as shells, skulls and fruit.
Chong, a Jamaican, has African, West Indian and Asian forbears, and in his work he investigates both his multicultural background and his transcultural identity. In these 'dialogues with his ancestors' he links various family members with one another. Chong in this way constructs a counterpart to an oral family history, passed down from generation to generation, transmitting norms and values, myths and anecdotes.
Nelson Garrido practices both documentary and art photography. He places expressions of popular culture at the centre of both genres. In the series shown here he juxtaposes his own Venezuelan, Roman Catholic identity with the American consumer society. In this way Garrido creates a new iconographic language around themes such as violence, religion, sex and trends, through which he poses questions about the socially enforced concepts, feelings and religious experience in Venezuela.
In the series 'Photograms' (2001) and 'Photographic Tapestries' (2001) Lissie Habié (Guatemala, b. 1954) experiments with a combination of early photographic techniques. With them she produces semi-abstract one-off works, freeing her photographs from aspects that are often connected with the medium such as reproducibility, rendering of reality and the freezing of time.
Habié wishes to integrate art and science with her accumulation of essentially manual techniques. Concepts such as chaos, complexity and movement, and their opposites order, simplicity and stability, are central to her work.
With forbears of Christian-Palestinian and French-Polish-Jewish background, Muriel Hasbun (El Salvador, b. 1961) has a family with an eventful history. At home the dramatic past of the Holocaust, flight and hiding was hardly spoken of; during the civil war that raged in El Salvador in the 1980s Hasbun could, however, imagine the history and feelings of displacement of her parents and grandparents.
Since 1990 Hasbun has devoted herself entirely to a visual investigation of her family history and her own identity. The on-going photo project 'Santos y Sombras' (Saints and Shadows) is a photographic diary in which she makes the invisible visible. Hasbun catches the concealed past in poetic images with multiple layers which are open for personal associations and new narratives.
'Eros+Thanatos' is a recent project with expressive, life-size images commemorating the civil war that held Guatemala in its grip for 35 years. With his multiple exposure prints, collages and photographs Daniel Hernández-Salazar (Guatemela, b. 1956) honours the victims, witnesses to his abhorrence of violence and points to the dangers of evil political forces. In these dramatic images the photographer weaves together his personal emotions and political statements.
'Absolute Revolution' is an homage to the revolutionary and innovative ideas of José Martí, Cuba's national author and true apostle of the revolution. The photographs show a monument in Revolution Plaza, on which all the important public and governmental buildings lie. In 1959 the name of this square was changed from Plaza Cívica José Martí to Plaza de la Revolución José Martí.
Through image manipulation Liudmila Velasco (Cuba, b. 1969) and Nelson de Arellano (Cuba, b. 1969) create various environments around this beacon of the revolution. In doing so they emphasize the strong symbolism of this image-defining monument.
'Pesca Milagrosa' (The miraculous catch of fishes) is what Colombian guerillas call their suddenly erected blockades on motorways. There they choose which of the people stopped will be kidnapped. Carlos Motta (Colombia, b. 1978) took this inhumane roulette game as his point of departure for the collage shown here. The fading photographs are digitally manipulated portraits of disappeared, missing or kidnapped persons from both South and North America.
In his work the young and very talented photo artist goes beyond the usual news photos of war, mass executions and victims of violence that we have become accustomed to and all too easily ignore. With this collage of 'burned heads' will give a face that sticks in the memory to 'the poor, the bad and the horrible'. With its many abstract colour fields Pesca Milagrosa (2002) is a enigmatic collage that continues to call up questions.
What girl has not played with make-up? Stuffed a balloon under her dress to play at being pregnant? Played mother? Or dressed up in her mother's or sister's clothing to parade around pertly?
The photographs from the series 'Portraits of Lucía' (2001) are disturbing. They show the seven-year-old daughter of Roxana Nagygellér (Costa Rica, b. 1963) portraying various female stereotypes. Lucía here personifies something that concerns Nagygellér, namely that the role patterns and limitations of the woman in Latin American society are already introduced in the childhood and education of young girls - and that this is an unconscious process in which we are all accomplices.
During the past decade Luis González Palma shot to fame as the most important photographer in Latin America. Around 1985 the Guatemalan, who had graduated as an architect and filmmaker, made his first photographs of dancers and actors with a borrowed camera. The theatrical aspects of these staged portraits were the basis for his later autonomous work.
González Palma stretched the traditional boundaries of the medium by incorporating his painted and scratched photographs in small installations. Using this new visual language he investigated the tragic heritage of colonialism and the subjugation of the native cultures of Guatemala. His serene, engaged and politically charged art photography grew in power from the time that he began to work in larger formats. A first, extensive solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art in New York in 1989 was ultimately the beginning of an impressive list of exhibitions in North America and Europe.
Emptiness, tranquillity, quietness and chilliness; austere and lonely. These are associations that you would not immediately expect from the work of a photographer from the lively, colourful and eruptive Central America. But they are precisely what Luis Parades (b. 1966) seeks.
In the early 1990s he processed his memories of the internal conflicts in the land of his birth in photo series such as Revelations and Mutations: formal and expressive work in which he scratched negatives, tore paper and was the first photographer in El Salvador to publish explicit nude photographs. When he contemplated the mangled landscape where land mines left behind from the conflict were detonated, he photographed the remains of half-burned - but also still partly fresh - flowers for Burnt Garden. Since then Paredes has settled in Denmark, where for a long period leukaemia prevented him from working. On the Baltic Sea he ultimately found recovery from his illness and inspiration for his Paisajes Esenciales (Essential landscapes). Paredes photographed the same location on different days and under various circumstances. All drama is absent from the montages constructed from these shots. What remains is an empty landscape, the passage of time and the ever=present horizon in a sea of silence. These poetic photographs announce a new phase in Paredes oeuvre.
In her intimate and personal photographs Marta Pérez Bravo (Cuba, b. 1959) transforms herself into a living altar. Together with symbolic attributes, in various poses and fragments she illustrates personal and mystic rituals that arise out of the Afro-Cuban culture, religion and history. The titles of her works, usually names of gods and goddesses, are not always explanatory, but serve as poetic characterisations of the black and white images which balance on the border of reality and mythology, mystery and beauty.
Initially Ricardo Gómez Pérez had to conquer his anxieties about his approaching fatherhood. But when his son was born in 1992 and a pair of twins followed in 1993, he was sold. He had to photograph them. Day after day he recorded how his three sons developed and slowly grew in the direction of taking their first steps. He continued until the boys became conscious of the camera and their attitudes and expressions were no longer natural.
FIRST STEPS stands head and shoulders above the average family album. Gómez Pérez himself calls the very personal and nostalgic photo series 'a diary of candid moments, from a period that will never return again'.
In her photography Karla Solano (Costa Rica, b. 1971) limits herself to her own body. For a long time she made x-ray photographs in order to literally 'get under her skin' and analyse herself. Later work, when her body was changed after giving birth, resulted in an overdose of radiation and multiple self-portraits in dramatic images like 'Under My Skin' - a fragmented female figure whose breasts and uterus are separated from the head in a bizarre manner. Solano continues her self-investigation in the series 'Geographies' and 'Make-ups' with intimate and sensual close-ups.
Solano belongs to a younger generation of artists in Costa Rica who with their autonomous work want to break with the usual, more traditional photography. In light of this, it is very extraordinary that Solano 'strips herself bare' in a society where nudity is not considered natural.
Cinthya Soto (Costa Rica, b. 1969) studied visual arts in Costa Rica, specialising in photography. In addition she is greatly interested in architecture, and in recent years received training in video and film in Switzerland, where she has lived since 1999. Various aspects of this wide artistic background come together in Soto's present work. Her own living environment is central to it. The interiors of the rooms where she comes and goes daily are recorded in multiple images, as if she is exploring the spaces for the first time with a film camera. Soto assembles these image fragments in clusters. Overlaps among the photographs and various points of view create confusion about the precise relationships in these spaces. At the same time the grid in which the images are presented provides a new order in Soto's personal explorations.
Central to the series 'Vida Tus Espinas' (Thorns of Life) are human relations and their effects on the personality. Irene Torrebiarte (Guatemala, b. 1970) shows in symbolic ways how people subconsciously continue to protect themselves when they begin a new relationship.
The series 'La Tarea' consists of leaves from a school notebook. The petals of flowers are counted off onto the text 'He loves me, he loves me not', while the heart of the flower changes into the barrel of a pistol.
About fifteen years ago various Central American artists were engaged in thoroughgoing investigations into the origin of modern society. In their visual analyses the concentrated on the Central American cultural past, African rites and Christian faith. From these historical backdrops Víctor Vázquez creates new and contemporary work. In his photographs and montages the primitive, mythological and religious symbols come together again. Vázquez mixes traditional codes with modern and personal visions into dark and mystic visions in which life, death, sacrifice and resurrection are central.
Patricia Villalobos Echeverría (USA/Nicaragua) was born in Tennessee, in the United States, in 1965 to Salvadoran parents, and grew up in Nicaragua. Not surprisingly her work concerns identity and transculturalism in an era of increasing globalisation. In her photographs, videos and installations Villalobos sets this theme against the background of personal texts, images, and the history of Nicaragua, with its countless conflicts and natural disasters.
Her subject in 'Viro' (2002) is the systematic disappearance of individuals, for example through torture, as happened under the dictatorial regimes of Central and South America during the final decades of the last century. In this way Villalobos gives a voice to the countless victims who were dumped as worthless bodies in those days.
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