PARAGUAY AND THE ART SYSTEM
Within the framework of Pinta Sud | ASU 2024 FORO conversatory, Ticio Escobar - moderated by Irene Gelfman - participated in the exclusive presentation of the book "Colección Mendonca. Paraguay and the art system", by Adriana Almada. The book was presented at CAF - Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Collection exercises – text by Adriana Almada, curator of the Mendonca Collection.
THE MENDONCA COLLECTION of contemporary art situates its field of interest in Paraguay, not only as a territory or physical space but also as a concept. In permanent interlocution with the country's history and socio-political current affairs, this corpus, built by jurist Daniel Mendonca over several decades, gathers some 700 pieces ranging from the 1960s to the present day, including earlier works that act as margins of reference.
Although its beginnings date back to 2000, the first public presentation of the collection occurred in 2019, with an exhibition curated by Ticio Escobar and Osvaldo Salerno at the CAV/ Museo del Barro entitled El exilio. This first exhibition was followed by three others. The second -Contrapuntos. Una intervención a dos tiempos- took place at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in 2020, curated by Félix Toranzos. The third -La vida es breve- took place at the Citibank Cultural Center in 2022, and the fourth -El país de las mujeres, at the Juan de Salazar Cultural Center of Spain in 2023. The last two curatorial projects were of my authorship and were developed within the framework of the art week Pinta Sud Asu.
These four exercises, deployed in neuralgic points of the cultural movement, opened the collection to plural discourses and encouraged new research.
In Paraguay, where the deficit of documentation and archives is considerable, private collections act as imaginary reserves that enable access to works and processes not recorded in the art historiography.
Dos historias Arte contemporáneo del Paraguay -a publication that appeared in 2021- records the first two exhibitions. Paraguay y el sistema del arte does the same with the last two, and from them it rehearses a reading on the historical conditions of emergence and possibility of artistic production in the country.
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Portada del libro.
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