私からあなたへ
貪欲な欲望:
欲望の行動を象徴する
The fourth edition of the ICPNA Contemporary Art Award takes place at a moment when we are beginning to emerge from the strictest social distancing measures that governed our lives for nearly a year and a half as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although 2021 began with a severe second wave, coupled with uncertainty regarding eventual vaccine access and constant political turbulence, the accelerated progress of vaccination processes and the decline in deaths in recent months have changed the landscape, also stimulating greater dynamism in artistic and cultural spaces. It has been a difficult year, and it may still be too early to understand the social and emotional consequences of the crisis we are still living through. For this reason, ICPNA's decision to continue this art competition is truly important, as it offers a meeting space for artists from different regions of the country who are taking the pulse of the present.
Nearly 250 applications were received, of which 55% were from artists in Lima and 45% from various cities across the country. The selection process considered the clarity and proficiency of the competing works and the artists' portfolios, as well as a desire to offer a pluralistic view of current artistic creation in a setting marked by centralism, misogyny, patriarchal culture, and social inequity that limits access to spaces under equal conditions. We sought to provide opportunities for young artists and new contestants, while always aiming to maintain generational diversity. The result is a finalist group of 42 artists from cities such as Cusco, Talara, Huánuco, Trujillo, Pucallpa, Arequipa, Huancayo, and Lima.
As is common with an open-themed call, the artists' explorations move in very diverse directions. These range from investigations into future Andean technology, digital commerce, and consumerism, the weight of academic rules, and the urgency of transgression, to nature and erotic desire. As 2021 marked the beginning of the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, several pieces focused on reflecting upon the memory of the bicentennial while underscoring the State's outstanding debts regarding its duty to guarantee full rights and citizenship. Another set of works makes visible racist violence, gender violence, and domestic inequality, but also art's potential to imagine processes of recognition, reconciliation, and healing.
The effects of the pandemic are also highly visible in the competition. Numerous works reflect a state of collective mourning, whether for the loss of family and close ones or due to the permanent sense of fear and insecurity left by the recent health crisis. The selection even allows us to read some important changes in the art scene. The growing presence of textile art in its various forms, used to investigate cultural history, family ties, or sexuality, signals the strengthening of a creative language that until two decades ago had occupied a secondary place. Similarly, different forms of ceramics—in the form of sculptures, installations, and assemblages—suggest renewed forms of dialogue between fiction and reality, and between the memory of the body and the earth.
The first honorable mention, awarded to In this infinity, in this flavor, suddenly it was just you and me (2021) by Vanessa Karin Valdez, highlights a very young artist whose work is dedicated to processing her personal experience of coming out publicly as a woman with a dissident sexuality, as well as the forms of violence she has had to face daily. The piece is an embroidery representing two intertwined floating bodies in a setting of flowers and stars, serving as a form of reclamation and recognition of a desire long banished to shame and secrecy.
The second honorable mention, Mayu (2021) by Adriana Cangalaya, indirectly reflects the impact of the pandemic on life. In December 2020, the artist decided to start painting on the boxes she received from daily delivery and courier services. The image of a family in front of a river also suggests the situation of transition and uncertainty experienced at that time.
This publication brings together all the finalist proposals, accompanied by a fragment written by the artists themselves as part of their applications to the competition. The exhibition is a defiant reflection of the turbulent times we are still living through, but which in turn remind us of the extraordinary power of visual culture to generate common bonds and help us imagine a future.
シンビオシスで展示された『De Mi para Ti』シリーズのインスタレーションビュー。
VANESSA KARIN FIRST HONORABLE MENTION
"When I was young and just beginning to understand my sexual orientation, I was violated and invalidated multiple times. For me, love was denied, and whatever I might feel simply did not exist. Much later, as an adult, when I had my first sexual relationship with another woman, everything felt so natural that I was finally able to accept every facet of my homosexuality. I make use of the embroidery technique because, in modern times, public and private spaces were created; these spaces were governed by public powers for the control of life. It is within private life that heterosexual marriage becomes the norm. By using embroidery, which was relegated to domestic chores, one can subvert these ideas and cross through the public and the private.
My choice of embroidery is a deliberate political act. In the modern era, the division between public and private spaces was established as a mechanism for the biopolitical control of life. As Michel Foucault explored, these public powers dictated the norms of existence, relegating non-conforming identities to the shadows. It is within the 'private' realm that the heterosexual marriage was enshrined as the only valid norm, while women’s labor—and their bodies—were sequestered and domesticated.
Historically, embroidery was used to construct a specific 'femininity': silent, docile, and confined to the household. By reclaiming this craft, I engage in what Rozsika Parker termed 'the subversive stitch.' I use the very tool that was designed to domesticate women to instead map out my own desire.
By embroidering scenes of intimacy, sexuality, and even the violence of my own history, I pull the private out into the public eye. I am using the 'domestic' to dismantle the 'domesticated.' The needle becomes a tool for transgression, piercing through the rigid boundaries of what is socially tolerated. In my work, embroidery is no longer a passive chore; it is a powerful language of resistance, reconstruction, and self-determination."
貪欲な欲望:
欲望の行動を象徴する
The exhibition of finalists for the ICPNA 2021 Contemporary Art Competition brings together works that intensely strive to imagine other worlds, to rehearse their readings of history with relevance and against the grain, and offers works that connect with everyday experiences, memory, and the irruption of the pandemic. These works allude to contexts of transformation, negotiation processes, and struggles for highly compromised, mobilizing, and necessary living conditions.
After a long process of observation, analysis, and deliberation, the jury decided to award the first prize to the work Taqui Onkoy, Chuquichinchay y la mala muerte presented by Javi Vargas Sotomayor, a result reached unanimously. In it, we found a rigorous process of artistic research, a committed personal trajectory, and a timely effort to transcend exclusionary languages such as those of the academy or, often, those of the contemporary art world itself, without necessarily falling into pedagogical resources with tutelary forms of communication. Furthermore, the piece confronts us, precisely and boldly, with recurrent problems within many of the works selected for the exhibition.
In Taqui Onkoy, Chuquichinchay y la mala muerte, Javi Vargas creates a two-dimensional cosmos for us, using the symbolic form of the Chakana as a support. Through this, he connects with the vast visual culture originating from the central Andes, suggesting the piece as an object designed to witness an experience of contemporary history as practiced in different parts of our territory through complex visual forms of knowledge (e.g., the Sarhua Tablets, the Burnt Gourds of the Mantaro Valley, the Ayacucho Altarpieces, among others). At the same time, Vargas takes on the challenge of traversing history using references to the imaginaries of Peruvian Baroque art, evoking historical figures like Túpac Amaru and the "liberator" San Martín. What the work ultimately tells us is a kind of cosmogony of a present marked by the health crisis caused by the encounter between SARS-CoV-2 and a postcolonial society like ours.
Thus, the central theme of the work is a kind of permanent negotiation between the two social categories of sexed bodies: the masculine and the feminine; situated in the time we have to live, without falling into a binarism that denies difference and ambiguity. Moreover, it seems evident that the universe Vargas proposes is one in which every body and space is inhabited by ambivalence; the same that serves to illustrate multiple prints, scenes, and trans-temporal characters.
It is also very clear to us that the work presented by Javi Vargas can be experienced as an aesthetic-political object; a very active one with a critical agency fundamental to the character that our time demands of contemporary artistic practices: rigor, complexity, and timeliness; but also as an opportunity to interpret from the subjective. Many scenes seem identifiable and, at the same time, suggest a private language (often interrogative), which accounts for a personal trajectory never again silenced.
Along with the first prize awarded to Javi Vargas, we decided to select two works to receive honorable mentions for their aesthetic qualities, their attention to the context, and, above all, for the enormous potential we find in their authors, carriers of a remarkable artistic sensibility. The mentions went to Adriana Cangalaya for the work Mayu and Vanessa Karin for the work En este infinito, en este sabor, de repente solo fuimos tú y yo.
It has been a pride, a pleasure, and a challenge to be part of the process as a jury for this version of the ICPNA Contemporary Art Competition. It remains for us an important vital experience and the recognition of a current Peruvian contemporary art field formed by surprising, uncomfortable, and moving artists and works.
貪欲な欲望:
欲望の行動を象徴する
This is the fourth edition of the Contemporary Art Award of the Peruvian North American Cultural Institute. The last two years have been particularly difficult, for reasons well known to all. This should lead us to reflect on the reasons behind the impulse to support culture.
In this edition of the award in particular, the pandemic and the conditions surrounding it, as well as the political situation, are some of the themes that our artists have addressed in the works submitted to the competition. And this is precisely what matters. Art—whether visual, performative, musical, or of any other kind—collects reflections (which should never be taken lightly or considered banal) from sensitive and intelligent individuals. That is why these creations are important: because they speak to us about the human condition.
The jury, composed of Gilda Mantilla, Jana Ugaz, and Carlos Zevallos, unanimously decided to award the prize to the work Taqui Onkoy, Chuquichinchay and the Bad Death by the artist Javi Vargas Sotomayor, finding in it a convergence of qualities. Not only aesthetic ones, but also those that make the work a document of our times: a representation of contemporary experience that does not overlook the political and cultural history of a country as complex as ours. The jury also decided to grant two honorable mentions: to Adriana Cangalaya for her work Mayu, and to Vanesa Karin for the work In this infinity, in this flavor, suddenly it was only you and me.
From these brief lines, I would like to thank the participation of each member of the jury, the work of curator Miguel A. López, and the entire team of the Peruvian North American Cultural Institute, who make it possible for initiatives such as this Award to consistently reach a successful outcome. I hope that the reader who has this book within reach will appreciate the effort we make to give culture an increasingly important space, even in difficult times such as those we are currently living through.