Rosângela Rennó. Exhibition view with (left to right) Los Angeles (Lori Shepler, Los Angeles Times); Senador Camará (Wania Corredo, O Globo News Agency); Assunción (Ruben Alfonso, Reuters), 2009; Digital print, inkjet, on Hahnemülle Photo Rag 308 paper; 
66 x 44 in. Courtesy of the artist.

In Body of Soul (the state of the world) (2003-2016), Rosângela Rennó amplifies and digitally modifies newspaper pictures that document a diverse range of public demonstrations. From a distance, Rennó’s three large-format photographs show crowds, but are zoomed in to focus on one person who stands holding a small portrait of, presumably, a lost loved one. From afar, the images are crisply legible, but sharpness dissolves as viewers approach the images and the halftone dots that were hard to distinguish from a distance appear outsized when up close. It becomes evident that the dots are not uniformly distributed; there are different densities deliberately arranged throughout the image, with tighter and smaller dots composing the image of the loved one, thus rendering it visible from all distances.

Although in her artist statement, Rennó aims to create a link between the spectator’s reflection in the frame’s glass and the daguerreotype technique of mirror imaging, what is most striking in the context of this show are the work’s titles. Each is named for the image’s original photographer, or the operator for Barthes: Ruben Alfonso from Reuters, Lori Shepler from the Los Angeles Times, and Wania Corredo from O Globo. It is the photographers who are identified—a surprising contrast to their amplified yet anonymous subjects. However, it is not these photographer’s original works we are seeing, but an image cropped and modified by Rennó to highlight a certain feeling; thus the work shifts not only each image’s authorship, but also its original punctum. By focusing on the image within the image, Rennó is altering the photograph’s effect from one that emphasizes the force of collective mobilization to the power of an individualized story, while granting the right of those who have already physically disappeared to not be swallowed in a sea of mechanically flattened visual narratives.

Teresa Margolles. El Exhumado, 2014; Armchair and plastic wrap; 47 x 35 x 43 in; C-print; 64 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist.

In El Exhumado (The Exhumed, 2016), Teresa Margolles disrupts the safe distance between viewer and image by bringing a piece of evidence—a specter itself—out of the photograph that hangs in the gallery’s wall and placing it in the exhibition space. Concerned by structural violence in northern Mexico, Margolles photographed a dilapidated home in Juárez, a city infamous for its permanently high rate of femicides and drug-related crimes. In the photograph we see a sofa—framed by wooden ornaments and once flamboyant red upholstery highly significant of a middle class status—trapped beneath the rubble of the collapsed ceiling. Exhumed as if it was a wounded body, the sofa now stands stoically in the gallery, its colors and features barely visible under protective plastic that wraps it and keeps it together. By saving this object from its otherwise inevitable demise, the artist refuses to accept what appears to be an unchangeable, doomed fate of Juárez, while also invoking a powerful embodiment of human struggle into the otherwise immaculate exhibition space.

Fredi Casco. The Return of The Sorcerers, Vol. 1, 2005; Digital prints; 7.8 x 9.8 in., each. Courtesy of the artist.

In the gallery’s lower floor, Fredi Casco’s The Return of The Sorcerers (2005, 2011, 2012) is presented in its three volumes, each a separate episode in which the artist uses a different set of photography-based strategies to confront the toxic legacy of Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguay’s dictator from 1954 until 1989. The eponymous horror story by Clark Ashton Smith, written in 1931, seems to have influenced the artist whose dark humor is unmistakable even when dealing with his own country’s most harrowing episodes. While in Smith’s story the unarticulated limbs of a corpse come back from the grave to haunt its killer, in Casco’s work, it is the lost or amputated images—collected by the artist in Asunción’s flea markets—of military men and their enabling cronies that come back to our present day to be identified, if only metaphorically, as culprits in the many crimes of Stroessner’s regime.

Fredi Casco. The Return of The Sorcerers, Vol. 1, 2005; Digital print; 7.8 x 9.8 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Twenty-four black-and-white pictures belonging to Volume 1 of the series line three walls of the gallery. At first sight the photographs appear to document diverse state dinners with middle-aged men and women, older military and clergymen, and what looks like leaders from different countries talking, signing papers, and drinking in official monotony. Upon closer inspection, we see that these characters not only appear homogenous in attire and attitude, but they’ve actually been digitally cloned; some have had their faces interchanged, while the heads of others have been covered with gas masks. The effect is both comical and disturbing, as the artist’s manipulations highlight the fact that in order to succeed in its genocidal enterprise, the Paraguayan dictatorship required—as all repressive regimes do—the compliance of an interchangeable set of minions coming from civil, religious, and political circles, both national and internationally.

From Strossner’s years of cold-blooded rule in Paraguay to present day Juárez, Spectres presents a distressing picture of a continent in which institutions seem to suffer systemic amnesia. The artists in this exhibition prevent their respective specters from vanishing by zooming into appropriated images to get to their symbolic cores, unearthing the symbols of a domesticity interrupted by crime and corruption, and by creating archives and imagining their corresponding stories out of what the system conveniently deems trash.

Written in the first person, Camera Lucida was Barthes’ attempt at grasping the power of photography to invoke the dead in the eyes of the living. For as important as the spectrum was for him, it was the spectator—himself in grieving—who was at the center of his argument. In these images it is again the spectator who is pressed to recognize the power of photography to have effects on things far larger than sentiment, indeed making us see and feel, but also forcing us to remember, think, and even act.

Spectres is on view at Mor Charpentier through December 22, 2016.

[1] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

cover image: Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos

Having spent the last 5 months in Brazil as a outsider peering in, I’ve tried to pull back the curtain to discover what is essentially Brazilian about artistic modes of production. It eludes me. The constant state of flux it impossible to pause and properly articulate. Much like the boom of the Brazilian economy, the art fervor here can be hard to grasp. From this touristic snapshot view, it appears that the infamous notion of antropofagia, or cannibalism – Brazil’s successful incorporation and reinvention of external influences (a notion popularized by the Tropicália movement in the late 1960s) – has been corroded from the inside out. Artistic practices in Brazil seem to be more concerned with a dissection and alteration of systems that involve the relationships between Brazil and other countries (specifically Latin American) and a reciprocation of influence. What I can see from this viewpoint is a particularly strong process of working through.

Newton Goto (from Recibo07+9)

The shape-shifting, nomadic quality of Brazilian artistic research is exemplified in projects like Recibo, a free artist-run publication focusing on the circulation of visual art actions and theoretical/political discourse. The idea-heavy publication is decidedly un-slick and has an interventionist function in the art world, with an emphasis on articles that give the reader a glimpse into critical research that provides the skeleton for artistic production (which doesn’t often share space with the end-result art).

Originally conceived by artist Traplev (Roberto Moreira Junior), Recibo takes on a curatorial function and is always a collaboration between the artist and a co-editor, often looking beyond Brazil’s borders. Editions have explored the relationships between Brazil and Buenos Aires, Berlin, and Colombia in Portuguese, Spanish, and a smattering of English.

Jarbas Lopes, Cicloviaérea (from Recibo010)

The 3rd edition, Recibo010, edited with Nara Milioli, Paisagem portátil (Portable Landscapes), looked at the geography of urbanism and mobility. The focus on portability conceptually doubles-over the circulation of theoretical exploration and artistic practices that experimental publications like Recibo provide within the artistic landscape.

Recibo057, Malambo, is the 5th edition created as the result of a residency in Cali, Colombia and co-edited with Yolanda Chois. Through critical reflection, points of contact and overlap between the two countries are highlighted. As a consequence of the bilingual text, readers of both languages are implored to read it’s latin counterpart, opening up possibilities of new interpretations by way of imperfect translation.

Suwon Lee, el muerto no tiene dolientes, 2009 (from Recibo088)

The upcoming Recibo88, Sobre a noção de despesa (On the notion of expenditure), is co-edited with Teresa Riccardi. 10,000 copies will be released in February with the support of Brazil’s Ministry of Culture. A challenging undertaking to probe and poke the economic matrix, this edition takes it’s name and concept from a segment of French writer Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share. Bataille presents an economic theory that looks at excessive and constantly outputting solar energy; the sun never receives energy in return and the end result of this surplus is in fact loss. Value, time, material, the art market, are all in a constant state of discursive questioning. Articles like Cuauhtémoc Medina and Mariana Botey’s In Defense of the Fetish (which examines the narrative of fetish worship from primitivist fetishes to sexual fetish to Western commodity fetishism) are juxtaposed with artistic projects like Cadu’s Doze meses. Over the course of a year, Cadu diligently and dramatically adjusted his energy consumption in his home, the end result of this consuming project is a simple, small arching design on his utility bill visually graphing his efforts.

Deyson Gilbert, da série Black Indexation, 2010 (from Recibo088)

If antropofagia came to prominence with Tropicália, perhaps the process now can be described as metabolizing or working through, an exercise of addressing the social, political, economic, and artistic foodstuffs that we consume everyday. Recibo takes the task of working through seriously, contributing to the dispersion of critical ideas while, importantly, acknowledging their inherent mutability.