Mexico City: Plegaria Muda (2008-2010), a sculpture-installation that the University Museum exhibits until September 4 at the Contemporary Art (MUAC), is part of the core of exhibitions of Fantasmas de la Libertad (Ghost of Freedom), artistic offers that take issue with the current conflicts that pound Latin America hard.
The sculpture-installation is made up of 166 units of two tables upside down and joined by a ground structure that allows the growth of pasture. Every unit has approximately the length and width of a standard coffin. In the MUAC exhibit, curated by Isabel Carlos (Coimbra, 1962), there are 96 of these units.
Commissioned by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon) and the Museum of Modern Art of Malmö (Sweden), the exhibition will continue its travel to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon), the Museum of Modern Art of Malmö (Sweden), the National Museum of Art of the 21st Century (Rome) and the Art Gallery of the São Paulo State (Brazil).
Salcedo works intensely with victims to the point of achieving a kind of communion in which the pain is transferred to the artist and to the piece. Nevertheless, she is aware of the inability to access to the experience in itself, for what she tries to mark especially an absence and a silence in spatial terms. The work turns into a meeting point where the silence of the victim, the silence of the artist and that of the spectator, join in the contemplation. With this work, Salcedo brings together a series of events that determine the unstoppable spiral of mimetic or segmented violence, or the one that characterizes both the internal conflicts and civil wars in the whole world. She wants us to face off the suppressed and unelaborated duel, the violent death when it is reduced to total insignificance.
Basically, the artist puts the political violence of Latin America countries on the table, like in her Colombian homeland. “The works,” Doris Salcedo has said, “are a pure absence and, simultaneously, an action of duel: a space of duel for every victim who creates a front of resistance to the suppression of the individuality imposed by the common grave.”
Doris Salcedo (Bogota, 1958) has exhibited in such places as the MoMA (New York), the Tate Modern (London) and the Queen Sophia National Museum and Center of Art (Madrid), among others.
MUSEO UNIVERSITARIO ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO (MUAC)
Insurgentes Sur 3000
Centro Cultural Universitario
Delegación Coyoacan. C.P. 04510
México D.F.
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