Magical (un)Real: Entranced Land

Magical (un)Real: Entranced Land
May 20 - June 30, 2016
Co-curated by Esperanza Mayobre and Daniel Greenfield-Campoverde

Exhibiting artists:
Patricia Dominguez, Beatrice Glow, Terence Gower, Daniel Greenfield-Campoverde Myeongsoo Kim, Esperanza Mayobre + Angela Bonadies, Rachelle Mozman
Claudia Peña Salinas

Public Event Participants:
Silvia Benedetti, Moira Fradinger, Luis Ospina
Lisa Blackmore/Visual Culture Section, Latin American Studies Association

Magical (un)Real: Entranced Land presents a survey of artists living and working in New York City whose subject matter presented in the exhibition is focused on Latin America.

Borrowing its title from Glauber Rocha’s seminal 1967 film Terra em Transe (Transl. Entranced Land), the exhibition presents a cross section of artists rekindling their connections with the Latin American continent through the lens of a traveler, a researcher, or an expatriate. Like Rocha’s film, about a man trapped between political factions in the hypothetical country of El Dorado, the works in this exhibition emphasize the dialectics of a region mired in neoliberal and populist ideologies in the last three decades.

Magical (un)Real: Entranced Land aims to demystify the notion of a unified continent, encapsulating the diversity of narratives that shape contemporary Latin America. These contemporary reflections center on inequalities between races/classes and structural/political violence that continue to prevail throughout the ideological shifts in the recent decades. Through a sensibility strictly rooted in the politically poetic, some of the artists featured in the exhibition examine the Latin American political landscape through the lens of the ‘other’.

Long fascinated with the histories of Modernism, Terence Gower (Canada/US) presents Art in Latin American Architecture, a series of photographs-cum-paintings documenting public artworks done for modernist university campuses in Mexico City, Caracas and Brasilia. Through his photographic and sculptural installation, Myeongsoo Kim (Korea) reconstructs the lost histories of Chacaltaya, Bolivia: the world’s highest altitude ski resort, which has been long abandoned due to the effects of global warming. Esperanza Mayobre (Venezuela), in collaboration with Angela Bonadies (Venezuela), presents Postcards from Venezuela, a suite of eight photographs that document the violent uprisings in her native country wrought upon the Chavista-Madurista regime. Daniel Greenfield-Campoverde (Venezuela/USA) addresses US interventionist histories and informal economies in contemporary Venezuela through his sculptural works. Rachelle Mozman (Panama) presents her video Loneliness Lonely, a fragmentary fictional narrative of Latin Americans, elaborating upon a sense of alienation and undefined trauma. Patricia Dominguez (Chile) examines the historical roles of horses in Honda, Colombia, and conflates colonial histories and the contemporary reality of narco trade in a looped video titled Eres Un Princeso. Beatrice Glow (USA) presents her ethnographical research concerning long-buried histories of the Chinese labor diaspora in Peru, and Claudia Peña-Salinas (Mexico) presents a series of exquisite monoprints documenting found anthropomorphic figures from Pre-Hispanic Mexico.

In addition, the exhibition will be accompanied by a series of film screenings, discussions and public events led by artists and leading Latin American Scholars.