Space to Dream: Recent Art from South America

“There must not be North for us, except in opposition to our South. Therefore, we now turn the map upside down, and then we have a true idea of our position, and not as the rest of the world wishes. The point of America, from now on, forever, insistently points to the South, our North.”
–Joaquín Torres García, 1941

Space to Dream: Recent Art from South America is the first comprehensive exhibition of its kind to be generated in Australasia. It is co-curated by Chilean Curator Beatriz Bustos Oyanedel and Auckland Art Gallery’s Principal Curator Dr. Zara Stanhope and is an insight into significant artists and ideas in art from South America from the late 1960s to today.

The work of 41 artists and collectives from across South America suggests how artists see a social significance for their work and how as rebels and revolutionaries, dreamers and poets, they have challenged, embraced or transformed their realities, cultures and spaces.

Space and dream are the abstract and ambiguous words chosen to name the journey that this exhibition proposes. Presenting some of the most noteworthy artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, Space to Dream: Recent Art from South America explores the rich diversity and innovation of art from this region. Key figures from the late 1960s and 70s, whose influence has been important, are introduced alongside a younger generation of artists from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay and Uruguay. The 98 works present different ways in which South America is a space in constant redefinition, a continent whose culture reflects the diversity of societies and peoples, histories and traditions, varying languages, customs and cultural values.

Beginning from the position that art in South America is broadly rooted across ideas and forms, the works in Space to Dream are collected under a number of themes: poetic sensibility, revolution and resistance, origins and intersections, memories and fractured histories, art’s ability to generate social consciousness and new, unthought-of possibilities. Notes on these themes appear throughout the exhibition as prompts to connect works with these ideas.

Whether conveying politics or poetry, the spiritual or the profane, art in recent decades in South America has been meaningful for offering generative spaces for reflection. Art taking a critical stance, encouraging social consciousness or documenting past revolutionary actions all signal the power to produce individual and collective agency. As well, the playful attitude of certain artists engenders insightful, embodied and non-hierarchical notions of culture. The mingling of indigenous and other cultures is expressed in ways that gives histories a currency. Other artists create innovative, inviting spaces in which can be imagined futures yet to come.

This is a space to dream, where disaster coexists with complex cultures and dynamic societies, in which art creates the exploratory and poetic face of this Southern territory.

Participating artists: Fernando Arias, Catalina Bauer, Paulo Bruscky, Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (C.A.D.A.) (Collective of Art Actions), Luis Camnitzer, Juan Castillo, Carlos Castro, Lygia Clark, Máximo Corvalán, Jonathas de Andrade, Lenora de Barros, Eugenio Dittborn, Juan Downey, Ronald Duarte, Juan Manuel Echavarría, Virginia Errázuriz, León Ferrari, Ignacio Gumucio, Patrick Hamilton, Juan Fernando Herrán, Alfredo Jaar, Joaquín Cociña & Cristóbal León, Marcos López, Kevin Mancera, Antonio Manuel, Cinthia Marcelle, Eduardo Navarro, Maria Nepomuceno, Ernesto Neto, Hélio Oiticica, Bernardo Oyarzún, Nicanor Parra, Violeta Parra, Liliana Porter, Rosângela Rennó, Miguel Ángel Ríos, Lotty Rosenfeld, Joaquín Sánchez, Martín Sastre, Demian Schopf, and Alejandro Thornton.

Publication: A 252-page Spanish/English publication presents the curatorial rationale in two essays by the curators and contextualising this period in South American art and the artists’ practices through the writings and interviews of Gustavo Buntnix, Sergio Rojas, Ticio Escobar and Guilherme Bueno. Other content includes images and texts that give insights into each artist’s work and practice.

An extensive visitor programme including a panel discussion, lectures, artist talks, curator tours, performances and a film programme complements the exhibition, beginning May 3.

For media enquiries:
olivia.boswell [​at​] aucklandartgallery.com