A total of 65 works by 40 artists of different generations and styles reinterpret the history of the region as told by cartographers, missionaries, scientists and adventurers.

Through painting, photography, sculpture or video, the exhibition "Chosen Memories", until September 9, is part of the collection of Venezuelan Patricia Phelps de Cisneros who donated it to the Museum of New York.

Articulated around three themes, the artists propose new "readings of the history" of European colonialism in Latin America and the revitalization of its cultural heritage, according to MoMA.

Thus with "Looting", the Guatemalan Regina José Galindo created a work with the gold inlays that a dentist placed in her molars and which, after extracting them again, remained as "impressions of her mouth that function as small sculptures of an imaginary archaeological museum", in a metaphor for the violence of the economies of extraction of raw materials.

A visitor to the exhibition "Chosen Memories" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) on May 1, 2023 who revisits the colonial history of Latin America thanks to contemporary artists. © Ana FERNÁNDEZ / AFP

"Terra Nova", the name of a map published in Europe in 1541, serves as a basis for the Dominican Firelei Báez to paint a ciguapa, a mythological female creature of her country, voluptuous and elusive which, juxtaposed with the diagram of the map, "embodies the fears and desires of European conquerors" to unknown cultures.

Argentine Leandro Katz used the first lithographs made in the 1830s by explorers John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, who studied the Maya region that now occupies southern Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, to reconstruct their expeditions.

Under the artistic name "Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis", Chileans Pedro Mardones Lemebel, a writer, and poet Francisco Casas present their version of "Las dos Fridas" in an impressive photograph, alluding to the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954).

"History is a living organism"

The artists immersed themselves "in the past in order to repair stories of dispossession, to reconnect with undervalued cultural heritages and to strengthen ties of kinship and belonging," the museum's curator of Latin American art, Argentine Inés Katzenstein, said in a statement.

A visitor observes the artwork "Mamá Kalunga" by Cuban artist José Bedia, part of the exhibition "Chosen Memories" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) on May 1, 2023. © Ana FERNÁNDEZ / AFP

"For example," she added to AFP, "the works offer a critical look at European colonialism."

For Brazilian photographer Rosangela Rennó, quoted by MoMA, "History is a living organism (...) constantly reviewed and re-evaluated".

For the organizers of "Chosen Memories", colonial structures continue to condition value systems around ancestral cultures, work and nature.

For the "past has never completely passed" and "is fertile field of possibilities for the present".

Part of what is on display at MoMA comes from the collection of Mrs. Phelps de Cisneros who donates 250 works to the museum for 25 years. In 2016, this Venezuelan, one of the world's leading private collectors, created an eponymous research institute dedicated to Latin American art.

MoMa has more than 5,000 works of modern and contemporary art from this region.

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© 2023 AFP