blurred black and white image of a man's face, movie still from 400 shots

Still from 400 Shots

Disappearances: Three Video Artists from Latin America

Feb 7, 2019–Jun 9, 2019
Joan Levine Freedman ’57 and Richard I. Freedman Gallery
Free and open to the public

Organized to complement Art_Latin_America: Against the Survey, Disappearances features video work from the past decade by three leading Latin American artists, all of whom refer metaphorically to those who have vanished because of state crimes and political violence.

In 4000 Shots (2010; 60 min.), Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade (b. 1982) shows a rapid-fire sequence of men caught unaware on the streets, which are partly the object of the male gaze but also recall the black and white photographs of the disappeared.

Earth (2013; 33 min.), by Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo (b. 1974), documents a tense performance in which an excavator carves out a burial pit around the artist’s naked body.

Claudia Joskowicz (b. 1968), originally from Bolivia and now an assistant professor at Wellesley, presents Some Dead Don’t Make a Sound (2015; 10 min. 30 sec.), a mournful yet lyrical homage to the disappearance of 43 Mexican students in the town of Ayotzinapa.

Curated by James Oles, Adjunct Curator of Latin American Art at the Davis Museum and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art at Wellesley College, the exhibition and catalogue were realized with generous funding from: 

Wellesley College Friends of Art at the Davis, Judith Blough Wentz ’57 Museum Programs Fund, Mellon Endowment for Academic Programs at the Davis Museum, The Helyn MacLean Endowed Program Fund for Contemporary and South Asian Art, The James Wilson Rayen Museum Gift, Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation