Darkness Visible

Liliana Maresca (Buenos Aires, 1951-1994), an artist, performer, and catalyst of alternative social circuits acting at the crossroads of diverse artistic circuits in Buenos Aires — visual arts, theatre, music, dance and literature — introduced a desacralizing attitude into the Buenos Aires underground scene during the 1980s and early 1990s, in the aftermath of the military dictatorship in Argentina and before her early death from AIDS-related causes in 1994. Her profoundly political work took the form of intimate, existentialist statements, whereby the artist would defy the social conventions of a fundamentally conservative time, provoking reflections on ethics, equity, and the importance of the spiritual in art in order to confront the tense atmosphere that resulted from the traumatic years of the dictatorship and the continuing subtle, structural psychological violence still exerted on women and LGBTQ+ communities in Argentina.

The sculptural objects present in her photoperformances literally constrain her body, attacking it, piercing it, hindering breathing and movement. Maresca roamed the city searching for discarded materials with which to build these sculptures. She would then test them on her body in a photography session with Marcos López (Santa Fe, Argentina, 1958; lives and works in Buenos Aires). The resulting work offers a key to Argentina’s post-dictatorship period: sensual, almost libertine, and at the same time marked by fracture and pain.

Marcelo Brodsky (Buenos Aires, 1961, where he lives and works) also suffered the regime’s violence first-hand: his brother Fernando and friends from his youth were forcibly disappeared and he himself was forced into exile during the last military dictatorship in Argentina. These traumatic life experiences persist and have since shaped a conceptual photographic body of work that has actively engaged with the human rights movements that emerged to denounce and confront State violence. Autorretrato ejecutado [Self-Portrait Executed] (1979) was shot in Barcelona, where the artist went into exile after the military attempted to abduct him in Buenos Aires. Los campos, IV [The Camps, IV] documents a demonstration by Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the human rights organisation founded in 1977 by a group of mothers whose children had forcibly disappeared during the dictatorship and who regularly demonstrated at Plaza de Mayo to demand their return or information about their fate.