Our represented artist Juvenal Barría is featured by the influential Latin American contemporary art web magazine Artishock, in an article for the group show EMERGE: Arte Contemporáneo del Puerto, which he co-curated together with art collector and curator Felipe Forteza at CV Galería's Secret Gallery in Santiago.
Read the complete publication here (in Spanish).
Find a translated excerpt below.
Seeking to decentralise the exhibition circuit of the Santiago axis, curator Felipe Forteza and artist Juvenal Barría have organised the exhibition EMERGE: Arte Contemporáneo del Puerto, which gathers 14 artists of diverse careers, generations and issues from the city-port of Valparaíso.
The title of the show, EMERGE, seeks to draw a parallel between the emerging condition of many of these artists and that of the space itself, which for a couple of years has been developing projects in which art, gastronomy, architecture, botany and design coexist in the spaces of the CV Gallery complex.
The fluid and transgender gender identity is approached by artist Juvenal Barría through performance and its registers. His work is influenced by his personal history, his sexual orientation and Huilliche ethnicity, as well as by queer theory and notions of decoloniality. Through a cathartic exercise, Barría shares the experience of the simulacrum lived from various points, from transvestism to the trans as a visual concept, to transformation as an axis of declaration, transgression and reflection on identities and social constructs. These fictions, simulations and constructed scenarios - in which La Martuca, a housemaid played by the artist, slips in - symbolise a collective unconscious without the possibility of error, heteronormative, patriarchal and hegemonic, which ends up proposing other routes through "reality" that disturb the social forms, reorganising and inserting this "error".
EMERGE: Arte Contemporáneo del Puerto is presented at CV Galería's Secret Gallery in Santiago until 24 March.
