![]() ![]() Juan Manuel Echavarría, from Colombia, symbolically suggests the pathology of disappearance in photographs of a weathered mannequin displayed like a body on an autopsy table. Not all the art is so specific in its references. Traverso, there are still bikes in Rosario awaiting their riders’ return. When a bike was found abandoned, it usually meant its owner had been captured. Bicycles, hard to identify and easy to hide, were the favored mode of transportation for resistance fighters. Sara Maneiro shows enlargements of X-rayed dental remains recovered from a mass grave of protesters massacred by government troops in Venezuela.įernando Traverso, an activist based in Rosario, Argentina, keeps the memory of dead friends alive by surreptitiously stenciling images of bicycles on city walls. Other work in the show is less diaristic, more about the facts of violence made visible. The reading was recorded on video the names sound through El Museo’s galleries. It included a public reading of their names. In the late 1990s, the artist organized a memorial for all of these people from his past. In a 1967 group portrait of his eighth-grade class, he has circled 13 of the 32 figures, to indicate friends who as adults would go into political exile or disappear.įernando appears again, and for the last time, in a 1979 picture, taken in a military prison were he was jailed as a dissident and, Mr. In early family snapshots, he is a child playing with his older brother, Fernando. Guagnini, who now lives in New York, where he is a co-founder of the artist-run Orchard gallery on the Lower East Side, has made a single sculpture about his missing parent: a cluster of upright posts on which his father’s portrait is painted in fragments so that the face comes into focus, then dissolves, as the viewer circles the piece.Ī photographic installation by Marcelo Brodsky, who is also from Argentina, expands the personal into a larger history. Nicolás Guagnini’s father, a leftist journalist in Buenos Aires, vanished in 1977, when the artist was 11, at the beginning of a period that saw the disappearance, torture and death of some 30,000 of his countrymen. Some of it is explicitly autobiographical. Directly or indirectly, their art is about these experiences. The 15 artists in the show are all from Latin American countries that experienced totalitarian regimes in the late 20th century, when almost every family had friends who disappeared or were themselves forced into hiding or exile. If I inquire or accuse, I may seal their fate. If I say nothing, a survivor thinks, maybe my husband, or child, or mother, or wife will be spared, even returned. Disappearance generates uncertainty, paralyzes action, leaves an open wound. A death permits mourning, assignment of blame, a possibility of closure. He’s one of the disappeared, “los desaparecidos,” the victim of terrorism through stealth removal. But they don’t know by whom, or where he’s been taken, or if he’s alive or dead. Relatives suspect that the missing man, who may or may not have had risky political ties, has been arrested or kidnapped. The title refers to a peculiarly chilling form of violence associated with political upheavals in Latin America over the last 40 years, one that is now becoming more common in Iraq.Ī man leaves for work one morning, but doesn’t come home at the end of the day, or later that night, or the next day. There may have been a more moving show of contemporary political art in the city this season than “The Disappeared” at El Museo del Barrio, but if so, I missed it.
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