SUR

Ivo Kamm Gallery, Zurich
23 November 2012 – 26 January 2013

Presenting
Nicola Costantino, Marina De Caro, León Ferrari, Graciela Sacco, Dolores Zorreguieta.

“Tucumán Arde!”, “Tucumán Is Burning!”  was the name of the legendary Argentinian group exhibition in Rosario and Buenos Aires in 1968. “At the time we wanted to talk politics with the help of art – but to the exclusion of art history” sums up the artist León Ferrari today, when he looks back to the events of this time in Argentina. The exhibition was more than just an art happening. It brought hunger and the national mismanagement into focus and marked the turning point in the life of numerous Argentinian artists by the withdrawal from art to a political practice. After 1968, Ferrari let his creative work rest for eight years.

A few of his companions even actively joined the guerrilla, – some of them disappeared, probably were killed. Our exhibition aims to contrast León Ferrari’s iconic work, which belongs to the artistic avant garde of the 1960s and 70s with the latest positions of four contemporary female artists. Especially the female point of view of Argentina’s eventful history and present., the accounting of the military dictatorship in the 1960s and the consequences of the neoliberal economic policy, which until this day produces poverty in broad levels of the population.

The artistic positions range from direct socio-political criticism to poems about pain to the internalisation of protective dream worlds. While Nicola Costantino, Garciela Sacco and Marina de Caro still live and work in Argentina, Dolores Zorreguieta has departed the country and today lives in the United States. The “very long history of political art in Argentina” as Ferrari calls it, continues. With their direct and blunt ideas of the different truths of reality the artist and the four female artists allow the spectator insights into the individual and collective consequences of the political and social upheavals of their country – in place of all the countries, whose histories run a similar course.