Urban impulses 1959-2016 : Latin American Photography

Featuring the work of over seventy photographers and artists, Urban Impulses embraces half a century of Latin American photography, from 1959 to 2016.
The exhibition is curated into two distinct but complementary themes: Shouts and Pop-ular. Shouts considers photography’s role not only in documenting identities and presences, but also to explore absences: in the face of kidnappings and forced disappearances carried out by authoritarian regimes, photography has been a weapon against silence. Public spaces and the city walls have also played an important role: when pen and paper, laws and rights, courts and judges have failed to obtain justice, the walls of the cities have taken on a life of their own. And photographers have portrayed these walls, covered with the slogans and cries of protest of those demanding political, social, and economic recognition, and reflecting the anger and cynicism, the hopes and frustrations of the cities’ residents.
In Pop-ular, artists’ mine the tropes of mass media and their manifestation in public spaces. Since the 1960s, as Latin America has undergone rapid development, advertising images have diversified and multiplied, marked by the rapid transition to a consumer society. The first widespread use of colour photography was in advertising, and the richness of pop culture imagery, often associated with commerce and advertising, marks the visual identity of the Latin American metropolis. Signs, patterns and typographies, often created by self- taught hands, confer on the display windows an almost innocent beauty. Pop culture in Latin America has a meaning adapted to its context, going far beyond a commentary on patterns of consumption and commodities. It is related rather to popular culture, closer to a vernacular aesthetic, with a capacity to create a symbiosis out of external pop influences. Latin America is a pastiche of the past and the present, of the local and the international.