PINACOTECA MIGRANTE: SPAIN AT THE VENICE BIENNALE
Spanish-Peruvian artist Sandra Gamarra Heshiki represents Spain at the Venice Biennale. It is the first time in 60 editions that an artist not born in Spain does so. Her project Pinacoteca migrante (Migrant gallery), questions colonial narratives and historical modes of representation.
Pinacoteca migrante is curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio, with a long career in Latin American art as artistic director of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Malba) or as curator of the Chilean pavilion at the 2018 Biennale.
Spain's pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale -to be held from April 20 to Nov. 24- turns into a space to reread Spain's pictorial heritage (Murillo, Zurbaran or even Velazquez) and to give visibility to silenced cultures. Gamarra Heshiki, who was already at the 2009 Venice Biennale in the pavilion of the Italian-Latin American Institute, takes as a starting point the paintings from the Empire to the Enlightenment, in which reference is made to the territories that were part of Spain, but that carry with them a "monolithic notion based on the destruction of other forms of social organization". Through six rooms or sections the exhibition will go through the classic genres of the arts with interventions and reinterpretations that will analyze the biased representations between colonizers and colonized, in addition to offering a historical context that is linked to the present day.
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Pavilion of SPAIN. PINACOTECA MIGRANTE / MIGRANT ART GALLERY. 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
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Pavilion of SPAIN. PINACOTECA MIGRANTE / MIGRANT ART GALLERY. 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
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Pavilion of SPAIN. PINACOTECA MIGRANTE / MIGRANT ART GALLERY. 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
The artist will transform the Spanish Pavilion into a historical art gallery of Western art where the notion of "migration", in its multiple facets, will be the protagonist. The Western concept of art gallery, which was exported to the former colonies, is inverted, exposing a series of historically silenced narratives. Thus, Pinacoteca migrante revisits the protocols of accessibility, diversity and sustainability to update institutions that take on contemporary debates on racism, migration or extractivism. The protagonists are migrants, both human and non-human: living organisms, plants and raw materials that often made the round trip by force.
The works presented interfere with the lack of decolonial narratives in museums and will analyze the biased representations between colonizers and colonized. Sociology, politics, art history and biology are intertwined in this research.
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Pavilion of SPAIN. PINACOTECA MIGRANTE / MIGRANT ART GALLERY. 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
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Pavilion of SPAIN. PINACOTECA MIGRANTE / MIGRANT ART GALLERY. 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
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Pavilion of SPAIN. PINACOTECA MIGRANTE / MIGRANT ART GALLERY. 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
The rooms that make up Pinacoteca migrante are titled: Tierra Virgen, on paintings of Spanish landscapes, but also from Latin America, the Philippines and North Africa; Gabinete de la extinción, which links colonialism with extractivism; Gabinete del Racismo Ilustrado, a story about how anthropology and science were used as a tool for racial discrimination; Máscaras mestizas, about the portrait of colonists; Retablo de la Naturaleza Moribunda, which will relate still life with the construction of opulence and treasures; and Jardín Migrante, which will recreate monuments about the conquest that are located in the former colonies. All of them will combine plastic arts with quotations from writers or ecofeminist thinkers; modifications of facsimiles of illustrations from real archives or representations of allochthonous or invasive plants, in allusion to migration.
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