Search results for ""Author Künstlerhaus Bethanien""

This book documents the project Radio Carabuco of the Bolivian artist Andrés Pereira Paz, which he created during his residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. A podcast (www.radiocarabuco.com) developed in collaboration with international artists, researchers, and activists forms the centerpiece of the project. Pereira Paz's critical reflections were inspired by José López de los Ríos's painting of a vision of hell, commissioned by the Catholic Church during the colonial era. Created in the Andes town of Carabuco in 1664, the work is still on display at the local church. Like many paintings from that period, the Christian motif was brought to Latin America by the Spanish colonial rulers to convert the indigenous population from paganism to Christianity and to peddle propaganda for Catholicism's message of salvation. The episodes of Pereira Paz's podcast investigate the methods and consequences of religious and cultural colonialism and scrutinise various political and societal perspectives, in particular with regard to his native country of Bolivia. The rejection and suppression of everything that is perceived as 'other' is a key theme of his work, which also addresses the question of whether the traditional Western idea of 'hell' has potentially become a symbolic place of active resistance against propaganda, censorship, and discrimination that should be defended as effectively as possible.

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Gladys Kalichini (born 1989 in Chingola, Zambia) is a contemporary visual artist and academic who investigates how women have been portrayed in relation to a dominant, colonial past. For example, the artist sheds light on instances in which women have been deleted from historical narratives and the collective memory of society. As a result of her extensive research, Kalichini has demonstrated that women were intentionally marginalised in the official representations of Zambia’s and Zimbabwe’s struggles for independence. In her elaborate multimedia installations and video art, which she often develops on the basis of research material and photos from archives, Kalichini highlights the omissions in the dominant representations of the two countries’ fight for freedom. She thus expands the history of their liberation struggle by drawing attention to the deletion and invisibility of female freedom fighters. By reminding the public of several of these women, Kalichini creates a diverse and complex alternative narrative of national independence.

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Hamlet Lavastida (b. 1983 in Havana, Cuba, lives and works in Havana) creates installations made of posters, prints, collages, photos, and video clips compiled into comprehensive archives. He primarily uses texts, images, and symbols, as well as political speeches and ideological terminologies, from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, the period in which socialism became increasingly institutionalised in his native Cuba. By re-appropriating and re-interpreting this material from an artistic perspective, Lavastida seeks to question the political developments of that era. This publication showcases Lavastida’s most recent installation at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. Through his personal confrontation with those cultural archives, which are not recognised as such in Cuban society, Lavastida creates a kind of register and calls for a critical examination of Cuba’s history. In particular, he condemns the failure to raise awareness about and address the scars of the past in today’s Cuba.

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