Framer Framed

Woord van curator: Carolina Ponce de León over de tentoonstelling HERE/NOW - Current Visions from Colombia

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Curator Carolina Ponce de León shares the contextual background of the exhibition HERE/NOW: Current Visions from Colombia. With a combination of art and photojournalism, HERE/NOW aims to elucidate the nuance and complexities of Colombia’s struggle against political violence.

Text by Carolina Ponce de León 

Colombia and the backdrop of an over 60-year history of armed conflict, fueled and financed through drug trafficking, weave the streams of inquiry beneath the works featured in the exhibition HERE/NOW: Current Visions from Colombia (2019). The exhibition showcases drawings, installations, paintings, photography and videos by twenty contemporary artists and photojournalists, born or based in Colombia.

As the first big group exhibition of Colombian art to be presented in the Netherlands, it was decided early on that the exhibit would focus on artistic production addressing social content. From that point of departure, a few considerations were taken into account. First, the complex nature of Colombia’s political situation. As Sergio Jaramillo, High Commissioner for Peace and architect of the negotiations between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – FARC, the oldest and largest insurgency group in the country – has stated, the Colombian conflict has been by far the most violent in Latin America. No other conflict in the region has produced so many victims, or such horrific acts of violence. The National Center for Historical Memory reports that over the last half century, there have been more than 7 million victims of terrorist attacks, massacres, disappearances, acts of torture, war crimes and human rights violations; over 220,000 dead; 83,000 missing and nearly six million people forcefully removed from their homes, generating the world’s second largest population of internally displaced individuals. These numbers are rooted in a legacy of political violence due to land ownership struggles and territorial warfare almost as old as the country itself. Coupled with a complex geography and rich cultural diversity, Colombia’s historical condition defies the possibility to contain, through visual representation alone, the full picture of the armed conflict’s scope and repercussions.

Second consideration: as the world’s foremost producer of cocaine, it is a common yet mistaken notion that the armed conflict is primarily about the illegal drug trade. This idea is reinforced as much by the official narratives of the global war on drugs as by the imaginaries in TV series and narrative films that blur the distinctions between reality and fiction in order to caricature and exploit Colombia’s association with political turmoil and organised crime.

To offset these challenges and misrepresentations, the first curatorial objective for HERE/NOW was to ground the viewer’s perception of the Colombian experience by mixing two distinctive modes of image-making —art and photojournalism— that are equally entrenched in the exploration of the internal war. Although seldom exhibited together within art contexts, in concert, they can potentially generate a broader and layered discursive space to articulate a visual representation of the nation’s complex realities.

By prompting this interaction, the exhibition seeks to provide a larger visual framework in which the documentary perspectives are not included exclusively to introduce a journalistic and didactic component into the exhibit —separate from the artwork— but to provoke an enrichening visual exchange between artistic discourse and the often-overlooked subjective and symbolic dimensions of documentary photography with its own capacity to suggest, express and expose emotional, latent and nonliteral content.

A third component of HERE/NOW is an outdoor installation of 12 flags (installed at the NDSM-wharf in Amsterdam-North), designed by Colombian artists at a time when the country was presumably at the eve of peace after four years of negotiations between the government and the FARC. Over the last three years, a peace agreement has been signed, the FARC guerrillas have vacated their camps, and 69 tons of weapons and ammunition have been handed over to the government. However, steady opposition to the peace process from a new (extreme) rightwing administration, dissident insurgents and obscure political forces that are systematically killing civil rights leaders —over 300 have been murdered since the peace agreement was signed— constantly erodes any prospect of peace. The flags, bright and colourful when they were originally installed in Bogotá in 2016, are now tattered and torn. Their current state is a metaphor of the dramatic shifts the country is presently facing in its struggle for a more peaceful future.

Carolina Ponce de León, 2019.

HERE/NOW is a collaboration between the What art can do Foundation and Framer Framed, curated by Carolina Ponce de León. 

HERE/NOW: Current Visions from Colombia is supported by the Ministry of Eductaion, Culture and Science (MinOCW), Amsterdam Fund for ther Arts (AfK), Tolhuistuin, Atelier Baztille, Stichting NDSM-Werf, Stedelijk Museum, Yumajai. 

Exposities

7 Mar – 30 Jun 2019

Expositie: HERE/NOW - Current Visions from Colombia

Hedendaagse kunst en fotojournalistiek van twintig kunstenaars uit Colombia, samengebracht door Carolina Ponce de León

Agenda

Netwerk

Carolina Ponce de León

Curator