Arte al paso

Between May and July, 2011, Hernández Saavedra’s image was utilized once again as a point of departure, in this case, to articulate an exhibition that examined the evolution of the contemporary Peruvian art scene, as well as the gradually growing importance of the role of the Museum of Art of Lima (MALI) in the region, a museum which, in the last decade, has assumed the task not only of looking to the past but also of building an institutional framework capable of preserving and channeling the most relevant proposals of present-day Peruvian art. Hence that the space represented in Hernández Saavedra’s image, which disappeared forty years ago, currently hosts an institution capable of presenting an exhibition of works from its own holdings in constant growth.

Although the beginnings of MALI’s collection of contemporary art date back to the first donations by artists in the 1950s, it has gained new momentum in recent years when it ceased to be a sort of annex of a great archaeological and historical collection to become a cultural heritage with an identity and orientation of its own. This transition has been marked by factors that have to do both with the development of the institution and with an art scene in full and radical transformation. The very dynamism of local art that led MALI to the creation, in 2007, of a specialized curatorial position and an Acquisitions Committee, devoted exclusively to the enhancement of the contemporary art collection. Thanks to the sustained work of this Committee, and to the donations contributed by artists and collectors, in only five years MALI has succeeded in amassing a new patrimony that covers the main filiations and paths of art produced in Peru during the past four decades.

Curated by Tatiana Cuevas (MALI Curator of Contemporary Art since 2008), in collaboration with Rodrigo Quijano (MALI’s Associate Curator for the Contemporary Art Acquisitions Committee since it was created in 2007), the exhibition, organized by MALI in collaboration with the Pinacoteca of the State of Sao Paulo, explored the transformations, the social and cultural conflicts that, since the 1960s and to the present, have not yet wholly succeeded in overcoming their controversial facets and their unredeemed situation, both in the symbolic and the historical and social spheres. At that moment, Lima, the country’s capital, was the center of a massive migration of rural populations, facing the subsequent difficulties that the cultural and economic integration of those inhabitants in urban life involved. One of these consequences was the boom of an informal sector of the economy, one of its most visible faces being street trade and the proliferation of street vendors, mainly those selling fast food in portable stalls at very low costs. Adopting this emblematic symptom of the local situation, the E.P.S. Huayco group gave the title of Arte al paso (Art en-passant) to an artistic action performed in 1980, acknowledged as one of the most relevant maneuvers within the artistic practices of the second half of the 20th century in Peru. This collective thus proposed an art which, since it lacked representational spaces, resorted to the streets to offer itself to the passers-by, many of whom were already the provincial heirs to the new Lima undergoing transformation.

Thirty-one years later, the exhibition recently presented at the Pinacoteca of the State of Sao Paulo borrowed the title of that key piece by E.P.S. Huayco to refer to a perspective that synthesizes the conditions of cultural production and creation in Peru in the past forty years, and the ways in which these circumstances were faced from the perspective of the visual arts during a period of oppositions, both hidden and explicit, in a context in which the historical strategies and reactions have defined part of the discourse and the praxis of an important sector of local art.

The structure of the exhibit responded to these issues by showcasing some emblematic works which, through their approach to conceptualism and other international avant-garde movements during the 1970s, questioned the local absence of an institutional framework, inevitably filtering a critique of the redeeming power of the past.
In addition to the already mentioned artists, the work of Sandra Gamarra in Tienda Museo LiMac, as well as that of Susana Torres, Juan Javier Salazar and William Cordoba stand out. A second axis is displayed around the new configuration of Peru on the basis of the ever-elusive notion of national identity and the consequent failed exercises involving projects in the fields of culture, education, development and urban planning, whose most notable incidences have been experienced in the capital, as well as in the effort to construct the landscape focusing the gaze on the coastal deserts, the Andean highlands and the tropical exuberance. Works by Flavia Gandolfo, David Zink Yi, Juan Enrique Bedoya, Christian Bendayán and Gilda Mantilla, together with Raimond Chaves converge in this instance.

The third nucleus of works is formed by those that pose reflection on the recent past of internal political violence and the subsequent denouncements in the light of abuse and the violation of human rights that affected more than 60,000 victims, according to the Final Report of the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation of the year 2003. The brave actions of Ricardo Wiesse, Eduardo Villanes, el Taller NN, the social photography workshops (talleres de fotografía social -TAFOS), among others, bear witness to one of the most decisive periods in the republican history of the country. This exhibition was articulated as a point of departure for the exploration and enhanced knowledge of one of the Latin American artistic processes yet to be discovered.