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September 11 – October 11, 2023
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Marisa Cornejo, Alfredo Jaar, Cristóbal Lehyt, Felipe Mujica, Iván Navarro & Courtney Smith, Johanna Unzueta, Cecilia Vicuña
It has been almost fifty years since the US-supported coup d’etat in Chile on September 11, 1973. Even a half century later, the after effects are borne within the political and individual bodies of those shattered by that violent rupture. While traumas often demand a reckoning with the past, they may also establish a way forward—a path that is transformative, constructive, and, ideally, optimistic. The exhibition Chile: Memory and the Future, features artists whose work reflects the long historical reverberations of the coup.
Salvador Allende was the democratically elected president of Chile, a socialist aligned with the left- leaning movements of Latin America in the 1960s and early 1970s. The coup was led by members of the Chilean military with the support of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the CIA. When Augusto Pinochet seized power after bombing La Moneda (the seat of the President of the Republic of Chile), a reign of terror began that included the imprisonment, murder, and exile of thousands of Chileans. One of the destabilization tactics utilized was the disappearance of over 3,000 people, whose bodies were never recovered. It was later revealed that many were raped and tortured and then thrown into the ocean, a technique that would go on to be widely used” in Argentina, under its dictatorship (1976 -1983). The Chilean coup of 1973 was one of the first demonstrations of the combined power of what would come to be known as “Operation Condor,” a US-backed terror network active in South American military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, and Peru.
The use of terror tactics was also a manifestation of the neo-liberal incursion into Latin America by those opposed to popular reforms and leftist policies. For the purposes of this exhibition, the coup is significant in its being one of the early and more violent demonstrations of US power in Latin America (see Guatemala 1954 and Dominican Republic in 1963 for earlier versions). The destabilization process leading up to the coup was detailed in Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine, which describes the use of economic turbulence or natural disasters to implement neoliberal economic policies that benefit a smaller and smaller group of shareholders, often at the expense of the so-called popular classes (poor, working poor and to some extent the middle class). In this sense, the coup was a signal to any anti-imperialist movements of what they would face.
The artists in the exhibition fall into two generations: the first are those who were exiled by the coup in 1973. The second are those born around the time of the coup, all now living abroad. What unites these artists is the continued activist approach to their work. In all cases, these artists keep the reality of the coup present in their thinking, but also address contemporary social and political issues with both a personal, critical and visionary stance. The title, Memory and the Future is meant not as a lament looking backward, but instead an acknowledgment of the past with a hopeful view of the future.
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