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discusses matters related to art history and museographical institutions in the United States and Canada. Apinan Poshyananda grounds her research on Asia in cannibalism, while Bart de Baere and Maaretta Jaukkuri emphasize the European distancing of the same concept, calling their contribution A-Antropofagia. Lorna Ferguson and Awa Meite propose a reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest according to Aimé Césaire in order to present African artists. Ami Steinitz and Vasif Kortum work on the dis/ appearance or annulment of distances in the Middle East. For this chronicle, I am selectively focusing on the Latin American “Rutas” (Routes) organized by Carvajal. Point of departure: a flat denial of all general characterizations for Latin American art. Time and again, the curator elucidates her conviction that contamination and the multiplicity of influences oppose all limits and conceptual borders – formal or geographical. On the continent, cannibalism serves as a metaphor for cultural assimilation, a “paradigm for the analysis of notions of decolonization and cultural emancipation” (8). She also demands the valuation of the process of creative discourse in light of the icon of the finished work. García Canclini’s appropriate agitation remains up in the air: “Will we soon be living a postmodernity in Latin America without having lived a modernity?” The exhibition is made up of works by the Mexican Gabriel Orozco (1962); the Brazilian – by adoption – Ana María Maiolino (1942); the Chilean – living in Australia – Juan Dávila (1946); the Belgian – living in Mexico City – Francis Alÿs (1959); Íñigo Manglano-Ovalle (1961), born in Madrid and living in the United States; the Venezuelan Meyer Vaisman (1960); the Colombians José Antonio Suárez (1955) and Doris Salcedo (1958); Miguel Río Branco (1946), a Canary Islander living in Rio de Janeiro; and the Argentine Víctor Grippo (1936). This is truly an irregular group of artists, generations and, consequently, dispositions, influences, trajectories, and languages. There are objects, installations, sculptures, photography, and video, in addition to the aforementioned mixed media. The conceptual marrow of the curators is perfectly sustained: it is one of the best structured pilot charts. The D-S Peugeot chopped by Orozco is pit against Doris Salcedo’s tremendous furniture sealed with concrete, from Alÿs’s photographically registered, melancholic wanderings through Mexico City, to Grippo’s Mesas blancas a la espera (White tables in the waiting). From Suárez’s graphic introspection to Vaisman’s Carlos Garaicoa. City viewed from the table at home, 1998. Wooden table and recovered glass objects. Various dimensions.
explicit introspection, and Maiolino’s manual, artisanal, and obsessive labor, to Manglano-Ovalle’s sophisticated technology of discourse. The possibilities of reading incessantly direct us to an irreducible otherness. The cliché of Latin America shatters into a thousand pieces. The Roteiros share the second floor space with a display of pieces by contemporary Brazilian artists. Next to widely recognized names like Tunga, Senise, Meireles, or Leonilson, the curators of this section – actually, the Biennial’s general curatorship – propose emerging names like those of Sandra Cinto and Nazareth Pacheco. And these are the most exciting. It could even be said that the works of the best known artists are poor figures in the Biennial’s totality, in part because they are dispersed throughout many points in the exhibition – as is the case with Tunga. Sandra Cinto composes very fine drawings of imaginary configurations on large panels. The tenuous lines that seem drawn with a light feather describe impossible islands, stairways, swings, and glass spiders that hang in infinite spaces. They remind us of Klee or of Saint-Exupéry’s elephant swallowed up by the boa, like dreams with no beginning or end. They are like linear spider Leonilson. The port, 1992. Embroidering on weaving on mirror. 9 x 7”.
Toshihiro Kuno. Unlitled,1996. Detail. Installation, wood, funerary urns, bronze urn, rope, Fuji sand. Various dimensions.