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Claudia Martínez Garay: Every seed is awakened
August 23 – November 17
Dundee Contemporary Arts presents the first solo exhibition in Scotland from the artist Claudia Martínez Garay.
Claudia Martínez Garay is a Peruvian artist who lives and works between Amsterdam and Lima. Martínez Garay’s practice encompasses painting, sculpture, printmaking, video, and site-specific installation. As well as interrogating European museum collections and histories, Martínez Garay also takes inspiration from her own Andean heritage, exploring historical images, propaganda, and sounds from her home country. Her sculptural works frequently reference pre-Columbian knowledge systems and are often combined in larger installations in dialogue with symbolic elements derived from her research.
For this major new solo exhibition at DCA, Martínez Garay brings together existing works alongside two new commissions, the first created during a production residency in DCA Print Studio. The artist’s second commission is sculptural, featuring bold graphic sublimated prints onto aluminium which will stand in 3-D against a new mural designed for DCA.
Installed across Gallery 1 will be the artist’s video animation Ayataki, which weaves together socio-political history in the aftermath of the 1980s Peruvian internal conflict between the Shining Path guerrillas and the military. This conflict led to forced disappearances, and the mass displacement and migration of families from rural to urban living environments. The film’s backdrop, a reconstructed landscape, references both the repercussions of civil struggle and the reality of vast migrations of people. It features the constant presence of a radio tower: these were often targeted during the war to limit communications through the country, and are now seen as a symbol of that era.
The accompanying soundscape combines original music written by the artist alongside audio samples ranging from traditional songs from the Peruvian Andes to sound footage from the 1970 documentary El terremoto de Áncash (The Ancash Earthquake). There is also occasional dialogue spoken in Spanish and Quechua, a group of languages spoken by the indigenous Quechua peoples of South America. Combined, the animation and sound create an atmospheric installation, with layers of history and civil unrest hauntingly brought to the fore.
More info here.
Supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands to the UK.
