Yesterday and Today

Cesar Gabler

Chile: Yesterday and Today was one of the many publications edited during Pinochet’s military dictatorship that tried to publicise the benevolence of his regime. With a  “before and after” logic, the book-form album promoted the drastic, and of course favourable, changes that the military administration brought to Chile. Yesterday was chaos, today order reigns. It was that simple. The photos and short texts, translated into English and French, tried to suggest a universality in the message, in an attempt to disprove the brutality of the hundreds of images documenting the attack on the Moneda Palace and the illegitimate detentions. Cold War. The visual language of the publication was similar to a late example – oh, the historical irony – of the language developed by the constructivists to promote the revolution of the young Soviet Union.

Nicolás Franco’s Yesterday and Today appropriates this publication and effects a simple cut and paste operation on it. Removing the central image on each page, the artist folds the page – regardless of the language – in order to expose the words “Yesterday” and “Today”. The effect is curious. The shapes created are reminiscent of the sign for infinity, and the presence on the same plane of the terms we use to designate the past and the present, seem to move towards it. Franco, by folding the page, coerces time and, much as Picasso does with his cubist guitars, reveals the structure of his object. The page of the book, with the photograph removed, becomes the frame of an empty space. This editorial geometry reminds us how close grids in design are to the solid models of early geometrism. The followers of De Stijl and constructivism interpreted painting and the idea of the frame as a project model that extends itself naturally to the home and to the printed page. The colour plane could be an empty room or a half-page photograph. The geometry should be both order and a model: plastic and social.

Something already characteristic in Franco´s practice is to refer to photography from the textual quotes that usually accompany them. Captions that explain the photos, describe them or simply present them. And on some occasions do all three, rendering the images themselves almost unnecessary. Much of Nicolás Franco’s photographic material comes from printed pages. He is, in the first instance, a consumer of images, not a producer. Franco doesn’t make new images; he reuses, rearranges or modifies existing documents. Almost always archive material or documents that are out of circulation. It’s a work that presupposes a notion of the archival, but which shies away from an orderly exhibition of collected material. One way or another Nicolás Franco denies the spectator easy access to the source material that he himself is discovering. In Yesterday and Today he has cut out and torn the pages, working with scraps. The artist seems not to trust the images and he resolves the issue of their presentation in ways that seem almost violent. The images return to us cut-up or rejected, perhaps much like the history they belong to. 

A Year in Art: 1973

What role does art play in politically tumultuous times?

This display considers how art was used as a form of protest responding to the 1973 coup d’etat in Chile.

On 11 September 1973, the first democratically elected socialist president in Latin America, Salvador Allende, was overthrown by a military coup. This led to public outcry and protests globally, including at the 1974 Venice Biennale and in London, where a number of socially engaged artists founded the Artists for Democracy and hosted A Festival for Democracy in Chile. The great sense of euphoria that Allende’s presidency represented was replaced by General Augusto Pinochet’s authoritarian regime during which time artists either emigrated from Chile or sought alternate ways to make their voices heard.

A Year in Art: 1973 explores how artists utilised art as a form of protest to express dissent, to bear witness, and to survive through turbulent times. It looks at one year as a departure point to consider long-term and far-reaching cultural repercussions. Bringing together works produced in various locations and time periods, the display highlights transnational solidarity networks and events that brought together artists, cultural workers, labour rights and political activists in unprecedented ways, merging art, life and politics.

The display includes work by Conrad Atkinson, Francisco Copello, John Dugger, Nicolás Franco, Alfredo Jaar, Carlos Leppe, Liliane Lijn, Lynn MacRitchie, Lotty Rosenfeld, Cecilia Vicuña, a selection of Arpilleras made by unknown artists from Chile, the music of Violeta Parra, and photobooks by Koen Wessing, David Burnett, Raymond Depardon, Chas Gerretsen, and Armindo Cardoso.

Curated by Clara Kim and Michael Wellen, with Fiontán Moran

Resistance Performed – Aesthetic Strategies under Repressive Regimes in Latin America

The exhibition presents stratagems artists devised to articulate dissent. The focus is on historic positions from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Uruguay since the late 1960s that bear witness to how oppositionists worked—and often risked their lives—to offer resistance to Latin America’s repressive political systems. The show highlights strategies of linguistic self-empowerment in the formats of performance art, interventions, and actions as practices of resistance. These pieces are presented in dialogue with works by contemporary artists from Central and South America who address the repercussions and lingering effects of dictatorial regimes. The selection is designed to unearth positions that have sunken into obscurity and draw attention to others that have not yet received the art-historical attention they merit.