Giuliana Vidarte on Sandra Gamarra
The Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI) is among the many few areas that provide town’s numerous audiences an outline of Peruvian artwork historical past. In current months, MALI has modified its everlasting exhibition by strategically putting items from its modern assortment amongst pre-Hispanic, colonial-era, post-Independence, and modernist artworks. This huge itinerary by the museum’s holdings culminates within the modern artwork gallery, the place Sandra Gamarra’s exhibition “Producción/Reproducción” is at the moment on view.
Curated by artwork historian and critic Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, the present brings collectively a collection of twenty canvases commissioned by the artist and produced in Dafen, the well-known “oil-painting village” in Shenzhen, China. They’re copies of a sequence of casta work commissioned from Lima painter Cristóbal de Lozano in 1770 by Viceroy Manuel de Amat y Junyent, who dominated Peru within the title of the king of Spain. Every portray exhibits a girl, a person, and a baby. Spanish inscriptions present racial identifications for every determine, which learn as if the phenomenon of human copy functioned like a math equation: GUINEAN BLACK WITH SPANIARD PRODUCES MULATTO or SPANIARD AND SERRANO INDIAN PRODUCES MESTIZO. Gamarra has added painted captions under every picture, bearing quotations from texts by modern feminists comparable to Silvia Federici and Claudia Mazzei Nogueira. They serve to replace the unique work by questioning using sure phrases within the authentic works and, above all, the verb to produce. The inscriptions confer with reproductive labor because the underrecognized precondition of salaried work. In Gamarra’s work, ladies sustaining their kids could be seen and understood as elementary to the “manufacturing” and “copy” of that labor power and of a system of care.
Each in Peru and in Spain, Gamarra has developed tasks linked to private and collective reminiscence, the development of historic discourses, and the violence generated by processes of colonization. Her method to those topics entails a mirrored image on pictorial follow, its materiality, and its capability for repetition and subversion of racial and gender stereotypes. In 2002, when there was no museum of up to date artwork in Lima, she created one, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima (LIMAC), which existed solely just about. Its on-line assortment included artworks by Gamarra herself and, later, by different artists, and its web site offers the playful impression that the museum is a bodily area.
This museum undertaking (a murals in itself) remains to be lively right this moment: A LIMAC retailer stand (containing museum merchandise comparable to tote luggage, pencils, mugs, and T-shirts) turned a part of MALI’s assortment in 2009.
Furthermore, LIMAC has donated the twenty canvases of Producción/Reproducción to MALI. The unique work are within the assortment of the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Madrid and have been exhibited at MALI in 2000. Gamarra’s copies mark the return of those photos to their authentic context, the place they’ll attain the audiences that the majority stand to learn from seeing them and considering them by. The work’ placement within the everlasting exhibition permits us to attach the totally different historic moments that coexist throughout the museum whereas additionally updating the gathering with the intention to let viewers perceive it in a up to date perspective.
Translated from Spanish by Michele Faguet.
— Giuliana Vidarte
