Latin American Suite

Saturday, October 4th
6 p.m. Short film screenings and discussion with Diana Wechsler and Anibal Jozami
8 p.m. Screening of The Disappearance of Liv Schulman Inherent to the tradition of modern and contemporary art is the act of confronting the art system by subverting its rules and transgressing its boundaries. Through this gesture, art questions and reveals the tensions of the present. Since the late 20th and early 21st centuries, numerous artists have moved beyond the problems of representation to challenge what Peter Bürger defined as “the institution of art.” In their effort to reactivate art’s critical dimension, they reject its material, conceptual, institutional, and social norms. The works selected as “cases” for this Latin American Suite explore various strategies through which artists evade, divert, or reject artistic conventions in order to shed light on new ways of thinking about the role of images. Often created in critical contexts, these images open up a repertoire of unsettling experiences for the viewer, inviting them to reconsider their modes of perception and to develop new perspectives on the contemporary world. Acts of resistance, art as a statement of survival, questioning the frameworks of representation, and restoring images to revive memory: all of these processes illustrate how contemporary art confronts itself. In doing so, it disavows its own canons and historical references in order to reinvent itself in each work and in the gaze of the viewer.