Maximiliano Durón (ARTnews) opinions “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Artwork within the Wake of Hurricane Maria,” which closes on the Whitney Museum this Sunday. [Also see our previous post Closing Celebration: no existe un mundo poshuracan.”] Listed below are excerpts:
So as to add the prefix post- to a phrase usually implies a transparent, resolute ending to one thing that has already occurred. But when one thing prefer it seems within the title of the Whitney Museum’s landmark exhibition “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Artwork within the Wake of Hurricane Maria,” which closes Sunday, it refers to an occasion that’s unfinished and nonetheless unfolding.
The exhibition takes its title from a line within the Raquel Salas Rivera’s poetry assortment, Whereas They Sleep: Beneath the Mattress Is One other Nation (2019), which consists of quick, fragmented poems that start in English and finish in Spanish by way of corresponding footnotes:
Curator Marcela Guerrero learn the gathering as she was planning the exhibition, because it expressed the framework that she was already conceptualizing for her present. The poem quickly turned the present’s guiding mild—a “conceptual palimpsest,” as Guerrero put it. She invited Salas Rivera to take part within the exhibition’s planning, which finally resulted in a listing essay and public program, and the poem is republished on {the catalogue}’s first web page.
“[The title] signifies to me this concept of being perpetually caught within the wake,” Guerrero instructed ARTnews. “There isn’t one other world—that is it. Clearly, hurricanes have a starting and an finish, however it’s this aftermath that’s retaining folks down. In essentially the most direct approach, it’s this concept of not being afforded the posh to assume past the catastrophe of the hurricane.”
A brief reflection from anthropology professor Yarimar Bonilla, additionally printed within the catalogue, places it succinctly: “The reckoning didn’t start with Maria, however Maria gave it a reputation.”
“No existe un mundo poshuracán” doesn’t cleanly translate into English. It may possibly both imply “A post-hurricane world doesn’t exist” or “There isn’t a world post-hurricane.” However both model loses the nuance of syntax of the Spanish language that Salas Rivera felt greatest conveyed his intention.
“The best way I wouldn’t need it to be learn is that I’m saying that we are able to by no means transfer previous Maria,” Salas Rivera mentioned in an interview. “The methods by which I hope it will be learn—and the way most individuals have felt it—is that it does really feel like there’s a earlier than and after Maria in some senses.” He’s fast to make clear that Hurricane Maria revealed “the worst and most evident features of the colonial relationship” between Puerto Rico and the US, and is merely “a continuation of colonial insurance policies” which have impacted the island, usually referred to as the world’s oldest colony, for over 500 years.
He added, “We’re dwelling within the wake of Maria even when it’s stopped being within the information. We come again to it as a spot of this unresolved grief and ache.”
Spanning the museum’s total sixth flooring, Guerrero’s exhibition brings collectively a mix of artworks in quite a lot of mediums that every one replicate the state of creative manufacturing that’s occurring in the meanwhile in Puerto Rico, New York, Chicago, Oakland, and elsewhere. Right here you’ll find conceptual, formal, and poetic methods for filtering the multitude of feelings that Maria elicited, in addition to reflections on the confluence of necessary occasions that predate Maria, like austerity measures imposed by the debt-restructuring PROMESA act from 2016 and the passing of Legal guidelines 20 and 22 that intention to draw non-Puerto Rican buyers to the island in 2012, or ones that comply with Maria, like mourning the useless and a promised restoration that has by no means fairly come.
Guerrero mentioned it was essential that an exhibition corresponding to this was “invested in complicating these histories,” which the hurricane had laid naked and uncovered—particularly at an establishment whose full identify is technically the Whitney Museum of American Artwork.
“So why not discuss concerning the colonial historical past of the US in Puerto Rico?” she requested of herself. “All of the occasions made me understand that it is a sort of window into a really particular timeframe, the place we are able to see how Puerto Rico, on this five-year interval, is a vortex of so many various occasions.”
Divided into 5 themes, like “Processing, Grieving, and Reflecting” and “Ecology and Panorama,” Guerrero gathered works that primarily eschew a literal or didactic method to discussing these matters, as she realized early on that “I may solely go to this point with that.”
That’s to the exhibition’s credit score. There’s loads of Puerto Rican historical past that most of the works within the exhibition contact on. Fairly than spelling out the background to those sociopolitical circumstances for the viewer, Guerrero wished to “present simply sufficient context” to that historical past whereas nonetheless “letting the paintings converse for itself.” [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/whitney-museum-no-existe-un-mundo-poshuracan-exhibition-1234665244/
[Photos above—First, Sofía Córdova, dawn_chorus ii: el niagara en bicicleta (still), 2018.COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KATE WERBLE GALLERY, NEW YORK; second, Miguel Luciano, Shields/Escudos, 2020, installation view, photo by MAXIMILÍANO DURÓN/ARTNEWS]