Free Trade Ensembladura, An Installation by Máximo Corvalán
November 12 - December 16, 2005
Curators | Milka Marinov & Julie Perlin Lee
About the Exhibition
Free Trade Ensambladura is an installation by visiting Chilean artist Máximo Corvalán in which the phenomenon produced by the overlapping of postmodern and anthropological spaces can be explored. Through the use of a life-size museum diorama, electronic media and sculpted mummified bodies embedded with neon signs, the installation attempts to call into question concepts of space, time, reality and the staged. The twisted bodies function not only as representation of the macabre link between death, consumerism and cultural tourist attractions, but specifically to the past violent era of Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship with the present.
In Free Trade Ensambladura, Corvalán “uses irony to reflect on landscape: The landscape as scenery inside the gallery. The pictorial landscape is recorded here but not as a citation of art history, but rather as a record of human history pedagogically exhibited, considering that the museum presents verisimilitudes. In this way, Corvalán returns to a topic that has been recurrent in his works: the body as a violence-practice place in which this violence can be interpreted but in which it can also become absorbed, assimilated, even erased by the present political policy as well.” (From “The Horizon of Desolation,” an essay by Sergio Rojas, in the exhibition catalog).
Catalog: Free Trade Ensambladura is documented with a full-color catalog containing complete installation images and all text in both Spanish and English. Included are essays written specifically for the exhibition by two current scholars.
Julia P. Herzberg, Ph.D, is an art historian and independent curator whose work focuses on contemporary Latin American, Latino and multicultural artists in the Americas. She has co-curated and organized many traveling exhibitions and has taught, lectured, and published extensively. In October 2005, she was a visiting professor at Catholic University in Santiago, Chile, where she gave a series of lectures on Ana Mendieta.
