24TH NOVEMBER 2010 – 8TH JANUARY 2011
I have not created images of war; however, I have created images of the landscape of the islands. The horror of war, abuse and fear are all underlying, encrypted to a secondary awareness.
Imperial Poem is contemporary Chilean artist Carlos Zuniga’s first European solo exhibition. This new body of work sees Zuniga’s gaze shift from the subject of the collective memory of his home country to that of the population and landscapes of the Falkland Islands.
Continuing a line of investigation initiated in his practice over the last four years, Zuniga’s vivid, captivating images are composed through the artist’s unique process of manually erasing text line by line; the artist may black out words, paragraphs, or on one occasion the entire text of Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Zuniga began plotting his compositions on Chilean phone book pages with his seminal work Next (2008). In Imperial Poem, the artist employs Argentinean phone book as the basis for a probing examination of issues surrounding censorship, identity and collective consciousness.
Over a quarter of a century after the conflict’s inconclusive resolution, to natives and Argentineans alike, the Falklands War remains a politically contentious subject. During a trip earlier this year, Zuniga spent ten days immersing himself in the islands’ unforgiving landscape and meeting the inhabitants of a region that serves as a provocative present-day reminder of Great Britain’s imperious past.
Imperial Poem captures the artist’s journey of discovery, combining the dramatic landscapes of the Falkland Islands with austere portraits of their inhabitants. The resulting works resonate with a quiet calm and haunting ambiguity, opening a subtly intrusive inquiry into national identity and history’s resonance in the islands communities. Visually wholly consuming, Zuniga’s non-violent images resurface the turbulent history suffered by the Falkland Islands. Without reaching foregone conclusions, the works highlight Argentina’s continuing claims to sovereignty over the Falklands, recalling a conflict consigned to history, a territory now overlooked and a people almost forgotten.
A fully illustrated catalogue featuring newly commissioned essays by Michelle Franke, Stefanie Kogler and Miriam Metliss will be published to accompany the exhibition.
