Abstract
This essay examines three museums of contemporary art in Lima, Peru: MAC (Museum of Contemporary Art), MALI (Lima Art Museum), and MASM (San Marcos Art Museum). As framed through curatorial studies and cultural politics, we argue that the curatorial practices of these institutions are embedded with tensions linked to the negotiation of regional, national, and international identities, coloniality, and alternate modernities between Western paradigms of contemporary art and contemporary vernacular art in Peru. Peruvian national institutions have not engaged in the collection of contemporary art, leaving these practices to private entities such as the MAC, MALI, and MASM. However, these three institutions have not, until recently, actively collected contemporary vernacular Peruvian art and its by-products, thus inscribing this work as “non-Western” through curatorial practices and creating competing conceptions of the contemporary. The curatorial practices of the MAC, MALI, and MASM reflect the complex and contested musealities and conceptions of the contemporary that co-exist in Lima. This essay will address this environment and the emergence of alternative forms of museality, curatorial practices, and indigenous artist’s strategies that continually construct and disrupt different modernities and create spaces for questioning constructs of contemporary art and Peruvian cultural identities.
Highlights
In 2016, Peruvian curator Gustavo Buntinx mapped an alternate history of Peruvian contemporary art via artist and curator projects that presented alternative modes of display and transgressive musealities in his exhibition, Museum Void: Half a Century of Peruvian Museotopies
The exhibition, which dealt with the institutional void for the display and cultivation of Peruvian contemporary art in Lima, was presented in the Contemporary Art Museum of Lima (MAC) that recently opened in 2013
Art Museum), and the MASM (San Marcos Art Museum). These organizations, as well as paradigmatic events such as the international art fairs “Art Lima” and “Peru Arte Contemporaneo” (PARC), which are all located in the capital city of Lima, have shaped the dominant conception of contemporary art in
Summary
In 2016, Peruvian curator Gustavo Buntinx mapped an alternate history of Peruvian contemporary art via artist and curator projects that presented alternative modes of display and transgressive musealities in his exhibition, Museum Void: Half a Century of Peruvian Museotopies. Indigenous and vernacular artists are attending to these conditions and subverting them in unique and dynamic ways that are based on their lived experiences and cultural contexts In doing so, these artists are shifting the established art system in Peru by producing their own modern and contemporary forms of art and negotiating their participation in Peruvian cultural. We will assert that critical producers of indigenous and vernacular art in Peru, both artists, and curators, have served as agents of decolonization by shifting the curatorial practices of Peruvian museums towards a presentation of art that recognizes and internalizes the complex identities and contours of Peruvian cultural production, articulating histories of alternative modernities and amplifying multiple contemporaneities unique to Peru that run counter to narratives of monolithic. Artists and curators have crafted alternative musealities that articulate and witness the specificities of Peruvian reality by introducing new epistemologies rooted in indigeneity that reconfigures colonial logics in productive ways
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