Rita Ponce de León and Tania Solomonoff, Desconocer juntos, ir a otro, 2016.

I’ve often found myself wondering whether it would really be such a radical gesture to show a majority of work by women without bracketing it as women’s work. What would it be like to experience a city filled with exhibitions that weren’t reinforcing the patriarchal tendencies of the art world?

In Lima this possibility came true.

It’s unclear if these exhibitions were coordinated to coincide with the #NiUnaMenos (NotOneLess) demonstration that drew more than 200,000 people to march on Lima to protest violence against women on August 13. Despite being an international movement, Ni Una Menos’s “cry against impunity” seems to have struck a particularly resonant chord in Peru where, according to Ana María Romero-Lozada, the country’s Minister for Women and Vulnerable Persons, ten women are murdered every month and twenty more are victims of attempted femicide, amounting to “about one [attack] per day.”(1)

For a city of ten million people, Lima’s art scene is small, with few progressive contemporary art galleries. As often happens elsewhere, Lima’s most experimental exhibition programs are found either in alternative spaces or galleries that started as alternative spaces, and curiously all of them were showing solo exhibitions by women.

"Guzmán’s capture and the economic recovery set the table for Acurio to serve the meal. But Acurio didn’t just serve dinner; gastronomy emerged a dominant force because absent a thriving arts climate, it gave Peruvians a contemporary cultural product that became a source of national pride around which people could gather regardless of politics.​"

Fatima Rodrigo, 'Otras Tardes', Installation view, Garúa, Photo courtesy Garúa, Photo: Pablo Hare

As soon as we had landed in Lima, the city was abuzz with talk about the fair. There were arguments over which was this year’s best stand; complaints about crowds and entrance fees; and scandal sparked by a critic’s declaration, in El País, that the whole affaire was ‘over’.

This was not an art fair but Mistura, the largest culinary festival in Latin America which annually attracts nearly 400,000 visitors to sample regional and haute Andean cuisine. In general, Peru is deeply divided by class, race and other legacies of colonialism, but the kitchen is a space where these differences can be bridged. The fusion that characterizes Peruvian food is a source of national pride.

Artists are usually the chief purveyors of radical idealism, but in Peruvian popular culture, chefs occupy that role. The worldwide escalating trendiness of foodie culture, growth of gastro-diplomacy and increasing importance of food politics in the face of climate change has all helped to contribute to their status. Writer Adam Gopnik’s assertion that, ‘mouth taste inevitably becomes moral taste,’ holds true in an overtly political sense: Peruvian chefs also enjoy an unparalleled degree of political clout. The most notable of these figures is celebrity chef Gastón Acurio, the founder of Mistura whom many believe to harbour presidential ambitions.

It was my first week in Mexico City and someone was screaming outside my window. At first I thought it was a drunk headed home from a nearby bar; as it grated on, I realized this was no drunk.

I went to my window and saw a woman in jeans and a sweatshirt and a man next to her slumped over against the wall of the middle school across the street. A third man walked away from the couple, passing in front of an idling truck. As he moved through the truck’s headlights I saw he was holding a machete. Without reason or warning he stopped and looked up at my window. I still do not know if he saw me, but I was so terrified by the possibility that I lay awake all night afraid to move, convinced I could hear the truck circling the block until sunrise. The lesson I learned is that sometimes things happen, and when they do, you cannot go to the window.

Review of Beyond Lawn and Order at José Garcia Gallery in Art Review October 2016

Nicolas Ceccaldi, 'To be Titled', 2016, Courtesy of House of Gaga

The mass-produced paintings that adorn dentists’ waiting rooms and model show homes are inoffensive but, invariably, depressingly dull. The absence of any specific referents in their anodyne landscapes renders obvious their assembly-line fabrication. They call to mind modernist Hermann Broch’s definition of kitsch as the product of ‘an emergent bourgeoisie caught between contradictory values: an asceticism of work on the one hand and an exaltation of feeling on the other’.

In ‘Les Chemins de la Honte – The Path of Shame’ at House of Gaga, Nicolas Ceccaldi presents just such a series of mass-produced works – purchased from the Pier 1 Imports section of a Sears department store in Mexico City – which he has altered with paint-pen markings, paper collages, animal skulls, butterfly wings, fabric flowers and hair clips. A series of wall-mounted animal skulls has also been similarly decorated. Gone are the artist’s dystopian cyborg sculptures and participatory readymades (Wearables, 2015). Here, Ceccaldi’s gaze has shifted to what the exhibition text refers to drily as ‘flora and fauna: the two essential elements of the natural world’. The artist continues: ‘The call of the wild is depicted in this exhibition as a reactionary tendency against the metropolis, a common reaction exemplified by the development of tourism, the spiritual appeal of rural sites, and the regain of consciousness and empathy for animal life.’ The pieces Ceccaldi presents, however, make little reference to nature. Rather, they appropriate paintings of nature produced on an assembly line – likely the one in Dafen, China, which churns out an estimated 60 percent of the world’s oil paintings for display in middle-class homes and offices. Nature, here, is not a subject of representation but another effect of human consumption.

Chelsea Culp, Installation Miss Universe, 2016, Yautepec

Chelsea Culprit’s Miss Universe reimagines the titular parade of competitive objectification as the psychic mise-en-scène of a strip club locker room, strewn with all the defences, reconciliations and intimacies needed to survive the pressure to perform.
 
In paintings and larger than life sculptures of back stage dancers in thongs and bras Culprit works to dismantle the basic-arithmetic economics of desire: more is more is more. Eschewing the soft-focus of finish-fetish she presents stubbly figures made of painted cement, high density foam, and sand with rough skin, thick calves, extra arms and platform dance shoes that while theoretically meant to elevate them, visually weigh them down.
 
Though the women are off-stage and indifferent to our gaze, I struggle to see them as liberated figures, even in these moments of locker-room intimacy. A sculpture of an almost faceless woman in a silver plastic dress with ‘tickle-window’ cutouts reclines, endlessly pouring herself a Red Bull through a fountain pump in the can. Titled Tired of Being Tired (all works 2016), her exhaustion defines her. A few feet away the dwarfed flame of a votive candle flickers in the Elephant Man-like hands of Her Fire, a woman frozen in the act of trying to light herself a menthol cigarette. Behind both women a painting proclaiming GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS, mimics a flashing neon sign in a window covered with tinfoil security bars suggesting a prison or a circuit. Think Peter Halley gone to the porn shop.

Jennifer Teets and Lorenzo Cirrincione, Chogosta, Jáltipan (Veracruz), 2016.

At Parallel, Oaxaca, curatorial-artistic-investigative-philosophical team Jennifer Teets and Lorenzo Cirrincione present “Elusive Earths III,” the third iteration of their ongoing ethnographic inquiry into the history of geophagic traditions. The practice of geophagia—earth eating—is adopted by human and nonhuman animals alike and occurs virtually worldwide. Among humans it generally appears in three forms: as cultural practice, as a survival response to famine or poverty, and as a psychological craving for non-nutritional foodstuffs, known as Pica.(1) It pertains to both the origins and the future of medicine, though the scientific properties of bentonite and kaolin clays that support its health-based uses are today most widely adopted by the mass-market beauty and wellness industries. Whether operating within its original contexts and modes of consumption or exported beyond them, the use of earth for medicinal or cosmetic purposes invokes questions about whether the earth provided is authentically sourced and prepared.

Inspired by sixteenth-century reproductions of terra sigillata [sealed earth]—clay pills produced by the ancient Greeks which according to Teets and Cirrincione are “one of the first lineages in pharmacology”—the project seeks to excavate linkages between the human and geological activity in the Anthropocene, including knowledge circuits, authenticity, performativity, and toxicity.