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.