1 November 2007 – 18 February 2008

Viva la muerte

Death in Hispanic Art
Death is a scandal in Western industrial nations: a biological disturbance of its production processes, an unpleasant reminder of the finiteness of a world based on the virtual infinity of the accumulation of capital, a confrontation with nothingness at variance with the fundamental consensus of a society of the spectacle reveling in its hollow actionistic trumps. People do their best to belittle death, to remove it from the domain of public consciousness, to permanently dispose of death in the caves of oblivion.
Focusing on the Hispanic and Latin American World, the exhibition “Viva la muerte!” tries to reveal a different approach to death in the mirror of art. Spain, as a European country that caught up with industrial modernity at a quite late point in time, has a centuries-long tradition of death ceremonies and dying cults that spans from the Hidalgos’ warrior ideology and the Baroque idea of vanity to the flagellantism of the Semana Santa. The mother country exported its ceremonial and inclusive forms of dealing with death to its colonies where, merging with local traditions, they brought forth their individual flowerings: the Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos) in Mexico, the confrontation with death and transience in the Cuban Santería and Palomonte cults, and the Candomblé religion with its sacrifice rituals in lusophone Brasil.

Yet, on a continent marked by machismo, caudillismo, and bloody military putsches, death has also a political dimension. Fidel Castro boasts to have survived 600 assassination attempts, and the motto of the Cuban Revolution “Socialismo o muerte. Venceremos!” has remained the same to this day. The Latin American experience, however, also includes a silent, everyday, unheroic death: there are the thousands of desaperecidos of Argentina’s military regime mourned by their weeping mothers on the Plaza de Mayo and the victims of the Sendero Luminoso guerilla movement in Peru, for example. Contemporary art from Spain and various Latin American countries regards death and the ritual practices concerned with it as an essential dimension of human existence which must not be hidden and counters the “nihilating nothing” as it also manifests itself in the bloody drug wars of Colombia and the pointless favela murders with powerful, often provocative and “politically incorrect” works.

Curators: Gerald Matt, Thomas Mießgang

Address

KUNSTHALLE Wien
MuseumsQuartier Museumsplatz 1
1070 Wien
phone +43 1 521 89 12 01
http://www.kunsthallewien.at

Opening Hours

Daily 10 a.m. - 7 p.m., Thursday 10 a.m. - 10 p.m.

"project space" at the Karlsplatz.

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