Virtual gallery
On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, Malba presents La historia como rumor (History as Rumor), an annual program of online exhibitions created by Gabriela Rangel, the museum artistic director, with the aim of documenting and contextualizing a set of performances that took place at different times and in various places in the Americas and the Caribbean, in a historical transition period marked by the end of the Cold War and the rise of the internet.
Every month, a research project—a collaborative effort between guest curators and various international museums and institutions—will allow the public to revisit a series of actions and performances that became milestones of their time, and that will engage in a conversation with the present. A video record of testimonies from spectators who witnessed those performances, and of experts from different disciplines giving their opinion on them, will create an archive that will make up the oral history for each of the projects. Guest curators include Sharon Lerner, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Sara Hermann, Regina José Galindo, Laura Ramos, Gustavo Buntinx, and Jochen Volz.
The selection of artists and specific performances and actions respond to a very broad framework that began to be debated regionally in 1981, at the First Latin American Colloquium on Non-Objectual Art and Urban Art at the Museum of Modern Art in Medellín, Colombia. The starting point of the selection also understands the historical transmission of performances as a rumor, defined as a multiple movement in a diagram sketched by Ulises Carrión, the Mexican poet and visual artist based in Amsterdam. Both frameworks propose the reconfiguration of a set of works in a period of time influenced by the conceptualisms that emerged since the 1960s.
According to Gabriela Rangel, “action art and performance—with their bumpy, incomplete, and often-oral history—have tended to be very sheer in texture, so slippery they escape any single narrative and are in chronic danger of disappearing. Ephemeral, yet repeatable, events (part theater, part ritual, part experience, and part dance), the performances compiled here cross the line of the past as well as the trenches of stable identities to spread a rumor in the present among those who could not see them. Art actions and performances often generate a collective mythology that begins with the testimonies of their actual witnesses. That mythology contracts the disease of the archive and spreads over time in the rumor of experts; it may or may not end up constituting a fiction. In any case, its fickle and volatile material always throws the order of words and things into disarray.”
The exhibition of each performance includes a record of the performance, along with vast archival material, such as photographs, films, storyboards, press clippings and documents that aid the reconstruction of the piece and its context. The digital archival show also includes an interview with someone who has witnessed it and video testimonies by leading specialists from different disciplines.
Released performances
Jorge Eielson
El Cuerpo de Giulia-no (The body of Giulia-No), Venice, 1972
Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Dos amerindios no descubiertos en Buenos Aires (Two Undiscovered Amerindians in Buenos Aires), 1994
Tania Bruguera
Destierro (Displacement), Havana, 1998
Francis Alÿs
When Faith Moves Mountains (Cuando la fe mueve montañas), Lima, Peru, 2002
Quisqueya Henríquez
Helado de agua de mar Caribe (Ice Cream Made from Water from the Carribean Sea), Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 2002
Regina José Galindo
El gran retorno (The Great Return), Guatemala City, 2019
Batato Barea
Las poetisas (The Poets), Buenos Aires, 1990
Carlos Leppe
Lección de acuarela (La escuela) (Watercolor Lesson (The School)), Trujillo, Peru, 1987
Upcoming performance (May 2021)
Tunga
Xifópagas Capilares entre Nós (Capillary Xiphopagus among Us), Rio de Janeiro, 1984
Main support: Sotheby´s
