STAGING THE REGION: EXHIBITIONS AND CURATORIAL PRACTICES IN THE GEOPOLITICAL CONSTRUCTION OF LATIN AMERICA, CENTRAL AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN
Exhibitions, biennials, museums and various exhibitionary devices have been central spaces in the production of imaginaries about Latin America. Drawing on Tony Bennett’s arguments regarding the exhibition as a cultural technology implicated in the construction of citizenship and nation, this symposium proposes to shift that discussion toward the construction, contestation and destabilization of the region through curatorial practices. We are interested in thinking about how, throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, different exhibitionary devices have not only displayed Latin American art but have actively produced ideas about what “Latin America,” “Central America” or “the Caribbean” is—or can be—within the international art field.
The symposium starts from a central question: in what ways have exhibitions and exhibition circuits contributed to constructing, expanding, fragmenting or questioning notions of region in Latin American art? Rather than assuming “Latin America” as a stable category, we are interested in analyzing it as an operative fiction, a cultural and geopolitical construction in permanent negotiation. In this sense, we seek to discuss how certain curatorial and museographic projects have reproduced hegemonic narratives about the region, while others have opened critical readings capable of incorporating historically marginalized geographies such as Central America and the Caribbean, as well as subjectivities and experiences shaped by gender, sexual dissidence, racialization, exile, migration, coloniality or violence in all its meanings.
Beyond the traditional museum, we propose to address the exhibitionary device as a web of discursive, spatial and pedagogical practices that operates both inside and outside the white cube: regional competitions, traveling exhibitions, independent projects, public programs, expanded archives, community museologies or territorial interventions.
We are particularly interested in how these devices have produced specific forms of mediation, circulation and cultural legitimation, as well as the tensions that emerge between center and periphery, internationalization and locality, institutionality and experimentation.
The symposium invites reflection on questions such as:
How have certain exhibitions produced specific notions of “Latin American art”?
What models of region have biennials, museums and curatorial circuits of the continent constructed?
What places did Central America and the Caribbean occupy—or were left out of—these narratives?
How have certain exhibitionary devices questioned patriarchal, colonial or heteronormative readings of the region?
What forms of political and cultural subjectivity did these exhibitions make visible?
What museographic and pedagogical strategies made it possible to move beyond the traditional white cube model?
How did mediation, the archive or exhibition architecture actively participate in the curatorial argument?
When does an exhibition function as a space of representation, and when as a space of contestation?
We especially invite proposals addressing: exhibitionary devices as the production of situated epistemologies; museography, mediation and curatorial pedagogies as discursive devices; biennials, competitions and alternative exhibition circuits; archives, reconstructions and exhibitionary memories; disputes over the construction of the Latin American, the Caribbean and the Central American space; transregional circulation and curatorial geopolitics; relationships between exhibition, territory, community and public space; experimental projects that move beyond the traditional logics of the museum and the white cube.
In dialogue with the axes of the 59th ICA, this symposium proposes to think of exhibitionary devices as cultural technologies capable of producing memory, knowledge and region—that is, spaces where historical narratives and ways of imagining Latin America are negotiated.
