September 2007
Next LAVAN meeting
 
Humberto Junca
Damn right!, 2006
Dibujo con esfero sobre madera / Pen drawing on wood
Tres piezas / Three pieces, 30 x 60 cm
The next Latin American Visual Arts Network (LAVAN) meeting will be held at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea on Monday 15th October 2007. The meeting will include a special viewing of the exhibition Displaced, Contemporary Art from Colombia (see below for details).
LAVAN is an informal network of UK curators with an interest in visual arts from Latin America. The network aims to:
- Provide opportunities for information sharing and open-dialogue
- Keep alive the enthusiasm for and grow knowledge of Latin American arts in the UK
- Build and sustain professional networks between the UK and Latin America
- Foster collaborative working
- Collate information about artists, groups, festivals, organisations
- Encourage the presentation of new, contemporary work in the UK
For more details please contact:
Adam Knights
Arts Projects Co-ordinator
Displaced: Contemporary Art from Colombia
6 October 2007 - 6 January 2008 Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea
Alberto Baraya, Milena Bonilla, François Bucher, Andrés Burbano, Johanna Calle, Carolina Caycedo, Wilson Díaz, Maria Elvira Escallón, Juan Fernando Herrán, Humberto Junca, Delcy Morelos, Oscar Muñoz, Nadín Ospina, José Alejandro Restrepo, Miguel Ángel Rojas.
This major exhibition of contemporary art from Colombia, originated by Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, is the largest to date in the UK. It features the work of 15 artists and includes photography, sculpture, video, painting, drawing and installation. The artists who have been selected for this exhibition are both emerging and established – several participating artists have exhibited at major international art festivals such as the Venice and Havana Biennales and have exhibited in the UK, whilst others are just emerging onto the international art scene, and their work is being exhibited for the first time outside Colombia.
At the core of this exhibition, and a constant theme of each artist’s work, is an exploration of what we might mean by terms such as ‘place’ and ‘belonging’, against a backdrop of local and global displacement which disrupts our sense of self, our identity. In Colombian society and indeed globally, mass migration is arguably one of the most important phenomena affecting social and cultural change. The constant movement of Colombia’s people from one part of the country to another has a huge effect on society and on people’s everyday lives. Mass migration occurs for various reasons, such as violence between warring factions, political and social events, changes to natural resources, or because people move from one place to another in search of better standards of living.
The social and cultural impact of these changes is explored in many different ways by the artists in this exhibition. For example, Nadin Ospina’s sculptures Ecstatic Critic (1993) and Idol with Doll, (2000) merge pre-Colombian artefacts with contemporary American icons. Ospina re-appropriates such images creating cultural hybrids. Wilson Diaz’s video The Rebels from the South (2002)focuses on members of FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army) performing traditional Colombian folk songs. Other works include Maria Elvira Escallón’s photographs (Nuevas Floras, 2003) of her living tree sculptures, whose carved forms are taken from various classical architectural designs and later colonial influences taken from furniture designs.
Artificial Plant Herbarium (2005) by Alberto Baraya, presents us with a series of works in which he has obsessively documented and arranged fake plastic plants found in homes and other interiors such as restaurants to comment on imposed meanings and obsessive categorisation. The exhibition also includes the powerful paintings of Delcy Morelos, The Colour I am (1999), in which she explores racial hierarchies, and José Alejandro Restrepo’s Paso del Quindio II (1997), a video work which uses archive footage showing a carguero (human carrier) who carried passengers – often the early explorers in Colombia – across dangerous terrain. Through his work, Restrepo, like many of the artists in this exhibition, explores complex relationships of power and issues arising from displacement.
With generous support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Colombia, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, the Colombian Embassy, London, The National Lottery through The Arts Council of Wales, Visiting Arts, British Council, Wales Arts International and the Friends of the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery.
Presented by Glynn Vivian Art Gallery as part of the Swansea Festival of Music and the Arts 2007.
http://www.swansea.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=1394
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