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Fifth Visual Arts Biennial of the Central American Isthmus
Author: Monica E. Kupfer
ArtNexus No. 64 - Dec 2006
|  | The Biennial of the Central American Isthmus is unique because it is an international event that takes place every two years in a different country. It is organized by a group of coordinators and sponsoring institutions in each of the participating nations, who have collaborated over the past ten years to present the biennial for the promotion of contemporary Central American art.
The fifth Visual Arts Biennial of the Central American Isthmus at the El Salvador Museum of Art (Museo de Arte de El Salvador, or MARTE) that was inaugurated in November of 2006 raised the standard according to which these regional exhibitions will be judged in the future. This was due in great part to the professional and refined look of the exhibition installed at MARTE, which has a museum-quality building, successful interior spaces, and an efficient team that worked closely with Rodolfo Molina, Coordinator of the Central American Biennial in El Salvador. The exhibition displayed a wide variety of works that proved that Central American art is more mature and current than ever before and that this traveling biennial has improved over the years.
The show included seventy-two works by thirty-six artists, six from each of the Central American countries (with the usual and unfortunate exception of Belize), distributed among the two floors and the exterior spaces of the Salvadorian museum. Although it included a similar number of artists and works as the previous Central American biennial, the exhibition in El Salvador made clear the deficiencies and overcrowding in the installation that took place in Panama. Among other things, it is noteworthy that at MARTE, in place of temporary spaces closed off with black cloth, small rooms were especially built for the presentation of videos to avoid having the sound of one work affect another. Even more remarkable was the presentation of the catalog of the fifth biennial during the opening; the corresponding book for the fourth version that took place in 2005 has yet to be published.
The Biennial of the Central American Isthmus is unique because it is an international event that takes place every two years in a different country. It is organized by a group of coordinators and sponsoring institutions in each of the participating nations, who have collaborated over the past ten years to present the biennial for the promotion of contemporary Central American art. As always, in keeping with the Biennial’s rules, all or most of the participating artists were invited to El Salvador, an important feature that contributes to making this a dynamic event—a real exchange between the creative spirits of the region. Moreover, in El Salvador, the organizers had the foresight to invite (in addition to the jurors) a considerable group of people from the world of contemporary art in the United States and in other parts of Latin America. Both artists and visitors were able to attend a conference where expert art historians from each of the Central American countries gave talks, a valuable educational contribution to the event. One might regret only the relatively small size of the audience, the technical problems with some of the talks, and the absence of visual material in others.
The international jurors of the fifth Central American Biennial were Paulo Herkenhoff from Brazil, Alanna Lockward, who is Dominican but lives in Germany, and the Spaniard Santiago B. Olmo, all experts in contemporary art and well known as curators and critics in the Latin American art scene. In their conversations with artists, interviews with reporters and at the round table open to the public, the jurors proved to be especially open to communication, contributing on a personal level to valuable exchanges of information. Regarding the exhibition, on several occasions they pointed out that they perceived among contemporary Central American artists an interest in looking more inward and less toward what is being done elsewhere—in creating art works that make reference to their own esthetic, social, and political situations.
During the round table, important subjects were raised, such as the differences in the way the participating artists are chosen for the Central American Biennials: in most countries, this is done through a local juried art show, but in Panama, it is managed by an art gallery. Discussions were also held regarding the prizes in these regional events, including the option to use the funds to support the work of all the participating artists rather than award prizes to a few. Nevertheless, the announcement of the prizes on opening night produced the usual comments and heightened emotions, as did the intervention by the Costa Rican artist Guillermo Vargas (also known as Habacuc) who, in a critique of “the show world with its artistic mega-events,” spread a red carpet of tomatoes on the way to the podium, along which the President of El Salvador and other dignitaries in charge of the ceremony had to parade.
The first prize of the fifth Biennial was awarded to the Nicaraguan artist Ernesto Salmeron for his Auras of War: Interventions in Nicaragua’s Revolutionary Public Space, an exceptional work of action art and living history developed over many years, which is an investigation of the post-war period in Nicaragua documented through photographs, newspapers, and videos. In San Salvador, the work included an IFA truck like those used during the conflict (but now named “El Gringo” and painted red and yellow), in which Salmeron transported from Nicaragua to MARTE part of a wall from a demolished house in Granada showing a timeworn graffiti silhouette of Sandino—the symbol of the revolution—as well as two discharged soldiers (desmovilizados) from the Nicaraguan civil war. The two crippled veterans and former enemies—one had fought with the Sandinistas and the other with the Contras—participated in the art work as historical guides, thereby granting a new dimension to the role of the “other” in art and promoting a sustainable notion of peace for the region.
The net-art projects by Jorge Alban of Costa Rica, who won the second prize, also dealt with the sociopolitical situation in Central America, specifically its relations with the great world powers, the promises and disadvantages of the free trade agreements, and the tragic circumstances of peasants kicked off their lands. In his interactive pieces, Alban combined incongruent sounds and images such as the rhetoric of a U.S. president with a bathroom, or a Catholic church with the violation of a farmer’s human rights. Other works that considered situations tolerated by Central American society or the processes inherent in the formation of a cultural identity included the video of Abner Benaim (a Panamanian artist who studied in Israel) trying to follow a salsa rhythm, the confrontation between ancestral and modern imported values in Barbie dolls with pre-Columbian heads by Raul Quintanilla of Nicaragua, and the video entitled Usnavi the Immigrant by Hugo Ochoa of Honduras.
The themes of citizens’ rights and nationalism were also present in a beautiful work entitled Manifesto/Salarrué’s Dress by Cristina Gozzini, an Italian artist living in El Salvador who won the third prize. Gozzini explored the ideas of identity and absence in an installation of subtle materials in a variety of whites that included a large feminine skirt made of delicate paper and placed on the floor in a spiral and a pile of sand on which the artist left her footprints. The skirt’s paper had printed upon it, repeatedly and in very small type, the letter “My Answer to the Patriots.” This document was written in 1932 by the great Salvadoran poet and painter Salarrué; in it, he defined and analyzed the matter of nationalism, which is so often misunderstood.
Among the works that stood out within the spirit of art and politics that permeated a large part of the biennial was Guillermo Vargas/Habacuc, who received an honorable mention. His aforementioned red carpet offered an ironic interpretation of the roles of power and authority, and his video entitled Policeman Intervening an Artwork about the Abuse of Power documented a policeman assigned to mediate between his installation in a Costa Rican prison and the visiting public. Equally interesting and also earning an honorable mention were the Salvadoran artist Danny Zavaleta’s digitalized interpretations of the city map of San Salvador, on which he indicated the more dangerous areas with graffiti-like marks. His pieces referred to both tragedy and danger in urban spaces, using a colorful language on a large canvas or an illuminated panel, much like advertisements. The ironic combination of flashiness and violence, together with the manipulation of images for the consumer market, characterized the work of Roberto Guerrero of Costa Rica, whose The Delicate Soldier’s Lethal Weapons consisted of a machine gun, two pistols, and a grenade decorated with gold and silver sequins. The Guatemalan artist Abel Lopez also found inspiration in the lack of civil security for a performance intervention, during which he placed signs that said “Assault Zone” in dangerous urban areas and recorded the perplexed reactions of people confronted with a well-known situation seemingly made worse because it had been publicly labeled. On a different level, the search for the region’s welfare also inspired the “esthetic surgeries” of geological faults by the Nicaraguan artist Cristina Cuadra.
In contrast with the many works related to conflicts and violence, there were several pieces with connections to domestic spaces, family situations, and gender issues. Milena García of Nicaragua received an honorable mention for a video installation of projections within two cubes, like secret chests, painted red and yellow and placed on a low black table. In an installation that looked like a minimalist sculpture, one video showed private spaces and objects, and the other was a strange scene in a meat market with the surprising appearance of an innocent-looking child. Children were also the protagonists in the work of Rachelle Mozman, a Panamanian artist who was raised in New York, whose photos of children from rich families in their homes constituted an odd form of sociological research. The images seemed innocent and yet perturbing, with insinuations of strange family environments and psychological tension. The photographs of apparently common and quotidian situations by Costa Rican artist Cynthia Soto produced a similar sense of ambiguity. Her multiple interior views of humble households full of decorative items but empty of human presence questioned both the role of photography versus reality as well as what can and cannot be understood as beautiful.
Domestic objects were featured in works by Adan Vallecillo of Honduras (who received an honorable mention) and Carmen Elena Trigueros of El Salvador. Vallecillo’s Casserolic was an absurd object, created by attaching a small television antenna onto a Teflon frying pan to make an ironic statement about the boundless technological consumption typical of globalization versus the worldwide hunger situation. In Trigueros’s piece, a series of sieves became the canvas for embroidered words and their shadows projected on the wall, with stitched semantic games such as a play on the Spanish words for “loving” and “hurting.” Everyday objects offered a space for silent protests against the oppression of women in Latin America, an interpretation that also applied to the paintings of household maids by Miky Fábrega of Panama, the installation of birdcages entitled I can’t love you this way by Ana Urquilla of El Salvador, and the videos of women by Sandra Monterroso from Guatemala. Other works that related to gender issues included the distorted image of a beauty queen by Mira Valencia of Panama and, more profoundly, the Nicaraguan artist Sagrario Chamorro’s installation entitled How Much Does a Pound Weigh?, which featured a clay fetus on a scale within a display case, a reconsideration of the dilemma between the right to abortion and the right to life.
In this exhibition that included objects, installations, art actions and videos, there was also space for traditional media. The small, original drawings entitled Generous Forms of Debating by Nahum Flores of Honduras proved that good art does not depend on a large format, a feeling echoed in the delicate watercolors by the Panamanian artist Octavio Arosemena. The compositions and social commentary in woodcuts by Marlov Barrios of Guatemala and Alicia Zamora of Nicaragua provided examples of the recent renewal in printmaking in the region. In terms of painting, there were, among others, the Salvadorian artist Camila Sol’s Braille-like patterns on a treadmill, two canvases within the silhouettes of computer monitors by Fernando Toledo of Panama, and two large panels in mixed media by Blas Aguilar of Honduras that fluctuated between abstraction and a sort of bloody reality. Honduras’s Nerlin Fuentes showed works in which he explored painting and sculpture in a minimalist vein, and Rafael Saenz of Costa Rica exhibited painted conceptual works that commented precisely on the absence of painting in most recent art.
During one of the conversations in San Salvador, Paulo Herkenhoff made the insightful comment that this exhibition revealed a certain “malaise about history.” There can be no doubt that the history of this complicated and long-suffering region offers much food for thought, and it seems healthy that these reflections should be expressed through contemporary art. Encounters such as this Central American biennial in El Salvador—where nationalities seemed less important than conversations and where artists from the different countries had an opportunity to express themselves and to exhibit their works—clearly foster the region’s cultural future.
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