NOTHING TO HIDE: The Feminine Landscape of 12 Latin American Artists is an exhibition of emerging, mid-career and renowned artists, two of whom have been invited to represent national pavilions at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.
These women reflect and project their feminine perspectives on the social landscape based on a contemporary society that has deep roots in ancestral cultures that to this day still survive in rituals, beliefs and traditions.
Their works point to an orphanhood in a society dismantled of sense, a society that is contradictory and fraught with violence. They reveal the failure of colonialism and its illusion of eliminating diversity by forcing the assimilation of a corrupted, complex identity that is difficult to decipher or be represented. In building their own visual representations, these attuned artists embody cultures that want to so loudly and openly speak out. It is a social instinct shaking Latin America's communities in various ways--a cry of a society in turmoil that aims to overcome social exclusion and discrimination. They channel the whispers of immigrants and young girls with no hopes on the horizon, and the lamentation of indigenous people living between the asphalt and the vertigo.
As such, the works of these artists assume a melancholy and poetic weight while remaining direct in their decry. Delving into secret female perceptions, and the primitive mystery of Mother Earth, they contain layers of meanings and readings.
They evoke the waterfalls and deep rivers coming from the snowcapped mountains, conjuring the fatigue of the people to leave a mark in the high moors and endless deserts of loneliness and desolation of our society. In Latin American capitals where millions of people are living inorganically in densely concentrated structures lacking any urban planning, they summon a female energy within as a strategy of survival to the constant disappointment of its capitalist system
These works challenge the visitor to decode this social X-ray and compliance of "that what is"--a crude reality confronted with the utopia of a discovered Latin American "continent", a "continent" that desperately wants its own identity. They express the pain and abandonment, and the long and arduous road towards healing and recognition of a future with more possibilities of integration. Balancing energies of both surrender and action (as there is power in surrendering and acceptance in action) is the first step towards change, and these women from fiery lands offer a vital visual voice that is fully part of the contemporary discourse.
We have nothing to hide, nothing to hide.
Manuela Viera-Gallo & Monika Bravo
