Opening Friday June 27th, 6pm.
To the Letter is the first BIENALSUR exhibition at the Centro Colombo Americano in Medellín. It brings together works by women artists who question language through translations and geographical accents, while also addressing its communicative, political, and symbolic dimensions. Each work explores the verbatim quality of language but also subverts, goes beyond, or redefines it, revealing the tensions between what is said and what remains unsaid. The expression “to the letter” refers both to strictly following a directive and to interpreting something exactly. This resonates from a gender perspective, as historically women have been expected to follow rules, facing a double bind: to comply with norms while at the same time developing creativity to deconstruct language from margins of resistance and creation. The title To the Letter evokes an inherent ambiguity in language, suggesting both strict adherence to words and a subversion or distortion of what is said. This dual nature highlights the complexities of language, which is not just a means of communication, but also a battleground between the literal and the interpreted, between fidelity and transgression.
Tensions emerge at its borders: between what is spoken and what is silenced, what is understood and what is distorted, what is translated and what is lost along the way, what is dictated and what is written down. In these works, linguistic and cultural tensions arise in contexts where language becomes a space of friction, negotiation, and resistance.
Image: Daniela Ortiz (PER) EI ABC de la Europa Racista, 2017
