Latin America's Political Art

Name: Latin America's Political Art
Item: Canadian Museum for Human Rights
Author: Galleries West

January 2, 2017

10:30 AM

Arpillera

This arpillera made by Chilean women depicts a military attack on Carmen Gloria Quintana and Rodrigo Rojas DeNegri, who later died. Photo by Aaron Cohen, CMHR.

Quilting is often seen as a comforting display of hominess, but an exhibit about freedom of expression in Latin America on view until July at Winnipeg’s Canadian Museum for Human Rights lays bare an alternative use of the craft as a tool of protest.

The display includes three arpilleras or patchwork pictures created by groups of women during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. A particularly chilling example tells the story of Carmen Gloria Quintana, an 18-year-old student protester who was drenched with gasoline and set alight in 1986.

The image shows Quintana sprawled on the ground, amidst a ring of soldiers, all set against a pastoral landscape. Quintana survived and, with help from Canadian diplomat Christian Labelle, was flown for treatment to Canada, where she now lives.

Curator Armando Perla interviewed Quintana last June:

I didn’t understand why they were doing this ... I never imagined that they were going to set me on fire ... and I was thinking I would have to clean myself well and head quietly home; I was sure they were just playing with us to scare us and that they would then send us home. That’s what I thought, and while they were doing this, an incendiary device came at us and exploded, and flame engulfed the entire area where Rodrigo and I were.

The exhibit also features Peruvian retablos that depict survivor testimonies from a long-running conflict in the 1980s and 1990s between the Shining Path militant group and the Peruvian government. Indigenous artist Edilberto Jiménez Quispe created two replicas of his work, including one in which a hummingbird spreads news about human rights violations.

Retablo

Peruvian indigenous artist Edilberto Jiménez Quispe created retablos – scenes inside portable wooden boxes in the style of altar pieces – that tell stories of violations against the Chungui people in the 1980s and 1990s. Jiménez created replicas of two works for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Photo by Aaron Cohen, CMHR.

The exhibit’s third component is a Day of the Dead altar created by the Museum of Memory and Tolerance in Mexico City as a call to protect journalists, often killed for reporting on drug cartels and government corruption. Dozens of Mexican journalists have been murdered – or have died under suspicious circumstances – over the last 25 years.

Six skulls Day of the Dead

These ceramic skulls are part of recreation of a Day of the Dead altar originally mounted by the Museum of Memory and Tolerance in Mexico City to draw attention to the murder and disappearance of Mexican journalists. Photo by Aaron Cohen, CMHR.

The altar focuses particular attention on Rubén Espinosa, a journalist tortured and killed in 2015. He is remembered through a display of candles, flowers and traditional painted ceramic skulls, their mouths taped shut.

Blue Skull

One of the ceramic skulls used to recreate a Day of the Dead altar originally mounted by the Museum of Memory and Tolerance in Mexico City. Photo by Aaron Cohen, CMHR.