Crying with Laughter: Tragedy, Comedy and the "Eco-Artistic" Turn in Chilean Contemporary Art
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
This presentation explores how a selection of contemporary Chilean artistic practices harnesses the tragic and comic registers as counter-visual responses to the spectacular regimes of the Anthropocene. More specifically, it examines how these registers—the tragic, with its focus on shared vulnerability, and the comic, with its capacity for irony and absurdity—challenge dominant visual regimes and invite new ways of approaching socio-environmental crises. By framing these artistic practices as counter-visualities, Halart also asks: can the capacity of the tragic and comic modes foster more relational ecological perspectives? And to what extent may these perspectives enter in resonance with the country’s territorial and cultural history? Halart will discuss works by Patricia Domínguez, Sofía de Grenade and Pilar Quinteros.
Sophie Halart is an art historian, specialized in contemporary Latin American art. She holds a PhD in Art History from University College London and a Master in Culture Industry from Goldsmiths College. Halart is Professor and Academic Director of the Instituto de Estética, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She is also Deputy Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Nantes, France. Her previous research and publications have examined the motif of skin in the artistic production of Chilean and Argentine artists and the relations between materiality, maternity and new feminisms in current Chilean art. Her latest research project, supported by a 2022/2023 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Grant, examines the place of visuality and images in the articulation of environmental and territorial strategies in Chilean contemporary art. She is currently writing a book on the topic provisionally entitled “Sights Unseen: Vision, Visuality and Environment in Contemporary Chilean Art”.
Contact name:
Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra
Contact phone:
07426808752