Lima, 1962. Lives in Berlin

Sergio Zevallos’ production is associated with the radical experience of Grupo Chaclacayo (1982-1994), of which he was a member alongside Helmut Psotta and Raúl Avellaneda. The group’s actions were created within the context of State-sponsored terrorism and the armed conflict with paramilitary organizations in Peru. Chaclacayo is a contemporary of Movimiento Subterráneo, a countercultural, anarchist phenomenon in which musicians, poets and architects came together to conduct radical actions on the fringes of the official art scene in 1980s Lima. In Chaclacayo’s statements, the body—theatrically cross-dressed and performed in a manner that blends pornography and Catholic liturgy—operated as a powerful criticism against the physical and symbolic violence that colonialism, religion and militarism impose upon the subject. This uncolonized, tortured, mutilated, burned or “disappeared” body was exhibited, naturalized and turned into spectacle on a daily basis in the media. According to Paul Preciado, Grupo Chaclacayo “operated one of the sharpest reflections on the functioning of necropolitics in post-colonial societies, their relations with mythic-religious instruments of semiotization and its sensorial and sexual metabolization through the social body”.

At Frestas, Zevallos presents Cuaderno de matemática [Math Notebook] (2014) and the pieces Callejón oscuro [Dark Alley] (2013) and HKG (2014), part of the series Matemática [Mathematics] (2013-2014). In this set of works, the artist builds narratives in which figurative representations of the human being form direct relations with instruments for the control, pathologization and extermination of bodies that are neither white nor heteronormative. The elements of these standardizing discourses are appropriated from texts, data and graphs taken from books on anatomy, physiology and hygiene, forensic medicine and Peru’s penal and civil codes.

[F.J.]

Sancti Spíritus, 1970. Lives in Düsseldorf

Diango Hernández’s artistic practices bear a direct relation to Caribbean tropical culture and the Cuban sociocultural and geopolitical context. The trade embargoes and economic crises, the Cuban/US conflict, the socialist ideology, and pre- and post-revolution Cuba are all recurrent themes in his sculptural and pictorial constructions. With strong discursive capacity and synthetic power, Hernández’s works articulate fictional realities and poetic actions. In Leg Me, Chair Me, Love me, on-show at the Triennial, a three-legged chair teeters precariously while the missing fourth leg travels around in a circle, reconnecting with the chair intermittently, as its orbit allows. When the chair becomes briefly whole, a light turns on overhead, only to switch off again as the leg continues on its way.

A designer and architect, Hernández spent ten years with Ordo Amoris Cabinet, a collective of Cuban artists and designers who create objects that fully embrace economic, material and technological instability as core attributes, in a way similar to the jerry-built aesthetic known as gambiarra in Brazil. The result was a hybrid created out of all manner of raw materials provisionally endowed with the form and function of a “designer” object.

[F.J.]

Kariya, 1933 – Nova York, 2014

Living in the United States, where he started producing work in tune with the conceptual art debate in the 60s, On Kawara focuses on a self-referential and experiential understanding of language and time. One of his best-known series is Today, begun in 1966. The series consists of paintings that do nothing but state the day, month and year of their making. Instead of channeling energy into composition, color and theme, the series obeys a few set rules: the date is always centralized and painted in white, in the same font, on a matte canvas.

Unlike other North-American conceptual artists, Kawara used painting as his main medium. In this series, for example, painting is the instrument he uses to keep time and state his own existence in the world, converted here into a simple time marker.

On display at Frestas, One Million Years is a reflection on time. Begun in the 1960s and still open to new experiences, even after Kawara’s death in 2014, the work consists of two books: the first, Past, is a record dedicated to “all those who lived and died”, and contains a list of all years from 998,031 BC to 1969; the second volume, Future, lists all years from 1993 to 1,001,992, and is dedicated to “the last one”. The instruction is for the books to be read in English by a man and a woman, who should utter past and future dates alternately. With this work, Kawara shows how random the chronological organization of life can be, as well as the absurdity of grappling with swathes of time as long as a million years.

[L.B.]

Denver, 1958 – Nova York, 1981

The model for most of her own photographs, Francesca Woodman worked mainly with self-portraits. In her pictures, set inside rundown houses, young women present themselves in ambivalent situations that suggest both strength and fragility. Sometimes her figures were photographed in movement, creating long-exposure shots of gossamery shapes seen in either dilapidated surroundings hostile to their presence or in the more welcoming bosom of nature.

Woodman’s suicide at the age of 22, after a long battle with depression, suggests a layer of meaning that is hard to overlook in any critical appraisal of her work. She left behind a considerable corpus of 800 photographs, most of it produced during her student years. Today, her parents are custodians of her collection, which carries all the drama and sarcasm of a challenging artist who was master of her own propositions. Though very young, she succeeded in forging an experimental style of her own that cites surrealism and the faked ghost pictures of the 19^th century. Woodman’s art also touched upon performance and issues of gender and identity, weighty themes on the US art scene in the 70s.

[L.B.]