The show featured 35 video works, including large installations, by 22 artists from across Latin America.
Rather than providing an encyclopedic survey of Latin American video art, this exhibition set out to offer a glimpse of the continent’s contemporary scene. Great care was taken to present the individual works as faithfully as possible so as to show both the videos and their creators to their best advantage.
From simple performance documentations through to comics, advertisements and cinematically complex narratives, every conceivable genre and iconography – no matter how idiosyncratic – was presented. The videos provide accounts of the everyday, of the social, political, philosophical, neurotic, violent and sensual. They are metaphorical, self-reflective, provocative, absurd, drastic, ironic, lyrical, and much more besides: their images move – themselves as well as us.
The works were arranged so as to allow them to allude repeatedly to one another and thus provoke discussion. This, in turn, set in motion a reciprocal process of discovery, and invited the viewer to enter into a stimulating interaction with the pieces on show.
Curators: Hans-Michael Herzog, Katrin Steffen, Käthe Walser