Taking as its starting point a disjointed reading of Georges Bataille’s book The Accursed Share (1949), this exhibition seeks to continue reflecting on violence, but now based on the work of three contemporary artists.
Josefina Guilisasti, in El caso de las cajitas de agua (2003), takes a police case from history to create, in seven parts, a severed body on a kitchen table, pieces wrapped in newspaper and oilcloth. The murderer is Rosa Faúndez, who embodies the precariousness of work in a domestic and marginal economy that falls with all its weight on the female body.
In El ladrillo (2018-2019), Patrick Hamilton displays a montage of files on a table that allow us to reinterpret the ways in which neoliberalism was implemented in Chile through “shock therapy” that eventually became a way of life.
In Christian Salablanca’s video, Dos piedras (2017), the clash of two fists and the reverberation of the sharp sound of the blows activate the memory of all the violence and resistance that have constituted the bitter fabric of history.
In these works, violence is presented as a traumatic memory. And if trauma means wound or violation, the visual operations exhibited here emerge themselves dismembered, broken, or grieving. From there, from that condition, they invite us to think about how images in art can resist the violence of the world.
