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Antiviral: Recent Peruvian Video Art is a minimal and visibly partial census of recent Peruvian video art. The exhibition brings together video explorations by nine artists, born between 1973 and 2001, with vastly different approaches to the medium. This diversity exists not only in terms of technique, visual resources, and thematic concerns but also in their familiarity with video as a medium. There are those who have been working systematically in video, and artists who are just beginning to explore its possibilities.
The participating artists form a diverse group whose work I actively follow. I am familiar with the work of some artists through my teaching, as is the case with Kinshiro Shimura, Lucía Beaumont, and Vanessa Karin. On the other hand, there are artists like Valeria de Carlo and Bruna Denegri whose work I discovered through Instagram. In the case of Nuria Cano, Tomás Orrego, Paola Vela, and Alejandro Hernández, I know their work from the local exhibition circuit.
The idea for this exhibition emerged in the context of the coronavirus quarantine. In that sense, its online format can be understood as an adherence to the surge in virtual exhibitions brought about by the pandemic. However, it also responds to the increasing use of digital media demanded by the initial lockdowns—something clearly visible in education, which was forced online during 2020.
For this reason, the exhibition brings together artists who participated in that new pedagogical experience (such as Lucía Beaumont and Kinshiro Shimura) and others who, despite having an established studio practice (such as Nuria Cano and Alejandro Hernández, with several painting exhibitions to their credit), are experimenting with video as a plastic and narrative resource. It was also key to include artists with a sustained interest in the medium (such as Paola Vela and Tomás Orrego) and others with a vital closeness to online platforms and digital imagery (Vanessa Karin, Bruna Denegri, and Valeria de Carlo). In this way, the idea of a “census” (in quotation marks, obviously, given its arbitrariness and partiality) of recent local video art took shape.
This scenario, marked by the Coronavirus, called for reflection on some of its effects on artistic production. Underlying the title of the exhibition, “Antiviral,” is both an apotropaic fantasy and a nod to the time we have spent confined in front of a screen consuming viral content.
In some cases, works directly address these reflections on the recent juncture. Such is the case with Rapaz (2021) by Lucía Beaumont, who explores the evocative capacity of sound in a piece of great sonic complexity and conceptual visual austerity, appealing to memory and the experience of isolation in the context of the pandemic. Nuria Cano also addresses confinement, anxiety, and the climate of alienation brought by the pandemic in Faceless (2021), articulating highly expressive images with recorded testimonies. Another artist working from the experience of lockdown is Valeria de Carlo, who in En mi cuarto..^.^ (2021) speaks about domestic intimacy from the perspective of her own room through a playful proposal based on stop-motion and the use of miniatures.
Kinshiro Shimura addresses our current techno-dependent life in Can’t Get Enough (2021) with a work based on a traditional technique (drawing on paper) and an aesthetic that nods to 17th-century Tenebrism. Historia del Perú (volumen extra) (2021) by Alejandro Hernández presents a critical commentary on the national situation, focusing on the continuous political, economic, and social crises Peru has experienced for decades as recorded by the media. Paola Vela also works in a narrative key in Travesía (2019), creating a travel diary through the Peruvian jungle, where text, image, and sound are articulated in sophisticated ways with a cinematographic and markedly poetic sense. Las hormonas del sueño (melatonin_mix_01) (2021) by Tomás Orrego is a videographic collage with an oblique and enigmatic narrative formed by repeated and freely associated visual symbols, appealing to the unconscious.
While Bruna Denegri nominally appeals to the unconscious (via the nightmare), Pesadillas y parálisis del sueño (2021) seeks to account for the very real experience of harassment faced by women in this violently patriarchal society, contrasting murky scenes with colorful, playful drawings.
Vanessa Karin also focuses on the difficulties the social context poses for sexual-affective bonds between women in Diferente querer (2021), highlighting the search for pleasure outside the horizon of long-term romantic love that the heteropatriarchy has traditionally exalted.
To a certain extent, the forays into video by this group of nine artists demonstrate the medium's vitality and expansion. Above all, the diversity of approaches at play aims to nullify any sense of a "movement" or even a "trend" surrounding video creation. Underlying this search is not an interest in trends, but an approach to that other “new normalcy”—not that of Covid-19, but of a life that is as real online as it is offline, occurring equally inside and outside the screen.
Max Hernández Calvo
심비오시스에서 전시된 'De Mi para Ti' 시리즈의 설치 모습.
It is an intimate reflection on the first sexual and emotional encounters between women, where desire is not ordered according to the traditional structures of romantic love, but flows from instinct, the body, and the search for shared pleasure. Animation here becomes a territory of sensory, emotional, and political exploration, celebrating lesbian desire without guilt, without a final destination, without needing to justify its existence beyond enjoyment.
This work does not seek to answer the question of how one should love. Rather, it opens the possibility that love—between women, born of desire, of instinct—can be different, multifaceted, and profoundly legitimate.
Diferente querer (Different Love) was conceived as a digital work, initially intended to circulate within the virtual group exhibition “Antiviral: Recent Peruvian Video Art,” curated by Max Hernández Calvo.
Later, it was presented in “Flirty Cry Baby,” Vanessa Karin’s first solo exhibition at the Ginsberg Gallery, also curated by Max Hernández Calvo. As an installation with three screens, each screen displayed, at intervals, the three animations that comprise Diferente querer.
“different love, different love, and different love”
The screens displayed “wanting differently, differently, and wanting differently,” starting from the right and moving to the left, mimicking Japanese reading, which is the opposite of Western reading.
Wanting Differently: recounts the personal and terrifying discovery of becoming aware of wanting/desiring another woman within a Catholic context.
Different: was a nod to the bodily changes during puberty, specifically menstruation, and the emergence of physical desires.
Wanting Differently: depicted the “different kind of wanting,” that is, seeking to satisfy sexual desire rather than emotional needs. Therefore, it wasn't a sexual or emotional “wanting” but rather a desire related to the purely sexual.