Martha Rosler: Si tú vivieras aquí

Public opening July 25, 7:30pm

The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo from Santiago de Chile; presents Si tú vivieras aquí (If you lived here), Martha Rosler’s first retrospective in Latin America; curated by Mariagrazia Muscatello and Montserrat Rojas Corradi, in its Parque Forestal venue.

Widely recognized for her work in photography, using hybrid languages between video, writing, installation and performance, Rosler features the public sphere as her main subject, focusing in everydayness, means of communication, war, gentrification and urbanization, amongst other issues, with a critical and feminist approach.

Si tú vivieras aquí includes a selection of works centered in gender studies, social conflicts and displacement and migration topics. The exhibition’s name is the Spanish translation of the artwork If you lived here, 1989, where Rosler questions the gentrification and impoverishment processes in the United States, during Ronald Reagan’s government. This translation targets new perspectives and reflections in the Latin American context, with local narratives, focusing specially in the construction of a new national identity after Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship during the 1970s and 80s. 

Some highlights are the photomontages from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the war home; impressions from the series Cuba and In the place of the public: Airport; and the videos Semiotics of the kitchen and Air Fare. These pieces dialogue with works from Chilean artists Claudia del Fierro, Cristóbal Cea, Bárbara Oettinger, Bernardo Oyarzún, Voluspa Jarpa and Máximo Corvalán-Pincheira, invited specifically to be part of this retrospective.

The Project Library Martha Rosler, is also part of the exhibition and is shaped through the donation of books by local agents, focusing in Chilean and Latin-American subjects. A previous version of this project was presented on 2005 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

About MAC
Both venues of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC)—Parque Forestal and Quinta Normal in Santiago—are dependent on the Faculty of Arts of the University of Chile. As such, the Museum shares the mission of the University: collecting the variety of trends that belong to our cultural reality, promoting continuous discussion and theoretical reflection on all fields of human knowledge.

As MAC is a museum focused on modern and contemporary art, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo is responsible for exploring new alternatives in art production in its Collection, curatorial guidelines, and both national and international guest exhibitions, from a contemporary perspective. The Collection—which includes over 3,000 artworks—represents a historiographical reference parallel to the current exhibitions. 

Through these features, one of the main purposes of MAC is to enhance its social commitment, providing a link between the audience and the suggested topics by new art expressions. In order to play such a socio-cultural role, and also with the aim of working incongruence with the reality of a changing world, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo also strives for developing wider programs, far from conventions—and in accordance with international standards—becoming a vehicle able to host different art fields simultaneously.