A detail in a painting by Venuca Evanán says it all. Tabla Apaykuy y las delicias de Villa (2019/24) depicts a scene typical of the artist’s Peruvian Sarhua community—several members in traditional clothing stand beneath an anthropomorphic sun and against sinuous hills—but, among the mountains, there are pylons. This exhibition—curated by Cristian Vargas Paillahueque and featuring Marilyn Boror Bor, Evanán, and Pablo Lincura—foregrounds aesthetic and thematic deviations from traditional depictions of Indigenous life. Its title, which translates as “Leaks of our own. Indigenous visualities from south to north,” promises escape from the obligation to explore ancestral themes or work within the supposed conventions of an Indigenous tradition, as if it had remained unchanged since pre-Hispanic times. Marilyn Boror Bor is from San Juan Sacatepéquez, a municipality that has suffered water shortages since the completion in 2018, against the wishes of the local Indigenous community, of Cementos Progreso’s San Gabriel cement plant. In Monumento vivo [Living monument] (2021–ongoing), a documented performance, the Mayan Kaqchikel artist stands on a plinth and covers her ankles with cement, merging with it in an action that seeks to commemorate the struggles of Indigenous peoples and defenders of the land, as well as referring to the …

Is that hysterical laughter? And are those accelerated heartbeats the phantasmagoric echoes of Chile, circa 1973? These sounds are not leaking into the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes but are rather the reverberations of an album released that same year: Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which plays on a loop in this exhibition of works made by Alfredo Jaar between 1974 and ’81. Jaar was seventeen when General Pinochet’s coup d’état tore his country apart, and the young artist sought refuge in this soundtrack of madness and despair. Pink Floyd’s front-man and lyricist Roger Waters last year released The Dark Side of the Moon Redux, a “reimagining” of the album from which this retrospective takes its title. Where he chose to replace David Gilmour’s guitar solos with homiletic spoken word, curator Pablo Chiuminatto has gone the other way. Rather than over-explain, Chiuminatto’s approach offers little contextualization or research for Jaar’s early works, which mark a turning point in the career of one of Latin America’s most significant artists. The restrained curation lends the show a provisional feel, an analysis of sketches by an obsessive apprentice. These range from Jaar’s initial experiments with dry-transfer lettering methods, such …