BERLIN.- To this day, the work of Teresa Burga (Iquitos, 1935) holds an exceptional position within Latin American discourse on art. From the 1960s onwards, Burga developed her pop and conceptual art in a country that was ruled by a nationalist military regime between 1968 and 1980, and thus at first she had to overcome significant obstacles in order to exhibit and become known. Accordingly, her artistic endeavours took a path parallel to populist demands of the time for a "Peruvian national" art. On this parallel course, in an extensive series of drawings, sketches and installations completed during the 1970s, Burga developed her method of constructing subjectivity using gestures and repetition.

Her most important exhibition of this time was Autorretrato. Estructura. Informe. 9.6.72 (Self-portrait. Structure. Report. 1972). In this wide-ranging project, the artist used her own body to create a medical map of herself – using drawings of her profile and photographs of her face, an ECG and a light that displayed her cardiac function, and a biochemical haemanalysis. Despite the fact that the project was received very sceptically in Lima, it is wi- thout doubt one of the greatest artistic ventures of its time. Autorretrato not only was and is an ironic reflection on the traditional, pictorial concept of the "self-portrait", but also engages critically with processes that seek to standardise the subject. Thus Burga's work emphasises the impossibility of thinking of the body as a biological reality without including the scientific methods that in a sense construct and legalise its representation.

From the 1960s, Burga increasingly made views of the female body the focus of her work and thus questioned the role of women – and that in a country where women had been excluded from political life up until the mid-20th century. Even in her first sculptures and pop art projects, Burga's approach was provocative, staging the female body using objects and furniture – such as beds, for example – and thus creating an ironic picture of women in patriarchal society. Her last project Perfil de la Mujer Peruana (Profile of the Peruvian Woman, 1980-1981), carried out together with the psychologist Marie-France Cathelat, took a similar approach: Burga and Cathelat designed a study and a survey of middle-class women between the ages of 24 and 29, captured the results in an exhibition and a book and thus created a sociological study of the imbalance between the sexes in Peru.

However, Burga's work does not only encourage us to think about the links between sexuality, publicity and power in Peru. During those years, the artist also created a series of drawings that were never exhibited. These are characterised by motifs reminiscent of fantastic buildings or machines that repeat themselves again and again. The artist has added meticulous details on the time of production to many of these works – both an ironic com- ment on the formulaic nature of conceptual art and simultaneously a reflection of modern work processes and the increasing bureaucratisation of life.

Burga's work casts a critical and sarcastic eye on the way that people's everyday lives are schematised, categorised and supervised in societies of control. Her drawings and installations reveal not only how technology replaces the human, but also how it influences and shapes current processes of socialisation: where life becomes increasingly lost between administrative procedures and trade in information.

-By: Miguel A. Lopéz Lima

Seeing complexity. Two previously unexhibited ensembles and some reflections on method from the estate of Anna Oppermann

During a visit to Paris on a scholarship in 1981, Anna Oppermann read Agnes Heller's book "A Theory of Feelings", which had just been published in German. This book must have confirmed her own experiences, thoughts and artistic endeavours on many different levels. The Hungarian philosopher, living in exile in New York, had finally rejected the opposition between thought and feeling that influenced Western thought to such a degree that its ef- fects could still be seen in the many attempts to discard it from the 1960s onwards. By contrast, Heller saw thought as a natural part of feeling and the complex human world of emotions as constituted by constant reflection. Conversely, she emphasised the influence of emotions on the construction of human systems of perception, value and orientation, and also identified "orientation feelings" based on collective social experience.

This book must have appealed to the artist, for since the mid-1960s she had concerned herself with facets of and shifts in gazes, attitudes, light cast on human positions, relationships and problems, and had presented the complexity of perception and reflection in ways that could be directly seen and experienced in her so-called "ensembles". It is surprising that Anna Oppermann forgot to include her ensemble grouping "A Theory of Feeling", created from 1981 onwards in the Cité des Arts, in the first catalogue of her works. In 2007 Herbert Hossmann and myself published it in the revised inventory of the estate.

It is now publicly exhibited for the first time in the Galerie Barbara Thumm – together with photographic work documenting the ways in which Anna Oppermann reflected on her method, which developed gradually through the artistic process of creation, and together with a group of self-portraits also only discovered posthumously. These photographic self-portraits in different poses, disguises and shifting arrangements were created from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. The artist herself kept them together as a group, but they were never made public. However, the artist's shifts in role and perspective – sometimes drastic, sometime subtle – are so remarkable and touching that we have taken the decision to publish them posthumously.