WASHINGTON, DC.- The OAS AMA | Art Museum of the Americas, the Secretaría de Cultura de Argentina, the Permanent Mission of Argentina to the OAS, and the Embassy of Argentina in Washington, DC present Territories and Subjectivities: Contemporary Art from Argentina, an exhibition featuring 33 innovative artists and co-curated by Fernando Farina and Andrés Labaké. This exhibition presents a vigorous panorama of fresh trends from various regions of the country, furthering AMA’s mission of supporting and promoting the arts of OAS member states, providing a forum for the exchange of ideas surrounding current social issues examined, in this case, through photographic dialogue.
This exhibition brings together artists of different generations and dissimilar backgrounds, trajectories, and levels of recognition. It reflects Argentina’s diversity, its extensive geographic regions and their particular characteristics; each of the country’s provinces is represented. The exhibition presents close-ups of Argentine visual artists who touch on issues related to creation of subjects and of subjectivity. The articulation of this creation is a conceptual and experiential territory.
Territories and Subjectivities has been conceived based on relationships that continuously permeate the physical world, mutating and reconfiguring. Individual, tribal, and collective territories communicate ways in which everyday occurrences are structured and how we give them meaning, suggesting existence as a set of determined circumstances and contexts. Each person’s symbolic place is a territory. These territories are defined by the physical world, appropriation, discourse, and voice. They are felt, conceived, and spoken.
This exhibition examines the notion of territory not as an inherent condition of the world that we share, but as something that humans define for themselves through subjective means. Subjectivity exists out of the impossibility of objectivity. Any given subject is decorated with constructed symbolism. Space creates a structural void, representing potential for filling it with human constructions.
The ideas of territory and of subjectivity are interconnected. Identities of boundaries and belonging are formed through affiliation and familiarity. Art itself often appears in terms of issues dealing with the borders and limits of speech and the limitations of written or spoken language. The subjectivities that are constructed through these artists’ works are collective. The idea of identity as communal reveals singularities as well as points of coincidence or divergence among different approaches and points of view.
