Dorota Biczel
I am an art historian, writer, and curator, as well as an artist in hiatus. I hold a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and a dual MA in art history and arts administration & policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Born in Warsaw, Poland, I have pursued what philosopher Vilém Flusser called “the freedom of a migrant,” which has led to experiments in life and work in Spain, Peru, and throughout the US. Those experiences have shaped my scholarly focus on contemporary Latin American art in the global context, especially during the moments of so-called political transitions. I am interested in how art, as well as broadly understood culture, contributes to the (re-)construction of political subjectivities and public sphere during those moments and how, simultaneously, art histories are reinvented. My dissertation, funded in part by the Social Science Research Council, examines experimental artistic and architectural practices in Lima as the means of creating new publics during the tumultuous period of an urban migration, transition to democracy, and onset of the civil war in 1980.
Supervisors: Andrea Giunta (PhD/MA thesis), George Flaherty (PhD), Rachel Weiss (MA thesis), and Daniel Quiles (PhD/MA thesis)
Supervisors: Andrea Giunta (PhD/MA thesis), George Flaherty (PhD), Rachel Weiss (MA thesis), and Daniel Quiles (PhD/MA thesis)
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Articles and Catalogue Essays by Dorota Biczel
Also with texts by Javier Sánchez Martínez and Ronnie Yates.
This article considers an unsuccessful bid of the Peruvian capital, Lima, to enter into global networks of artistic exchange through a short-lived, ostensibly failed project: Lima Biennial of Latin American Art [Bienal Iberoamericana de Lima], held three times between 1997 and 2002. Aside from a collapse of the municipal cultural policies, the article attribues the “failure” to other, aesthetic and political factors that highlight the contradictions involved in exhibition-making. On the one hand, it discusses an impossibility of striking the unattainable perfect balance between “international” and “local” ingredients that would be legible and artistically satisfactory to both internal and external observers, which would have been crucial in the area long considered closed off from the rest of Latin America. On the other hand, it scrutinizes the biennial project in the light of the rapidly evolving understanding of site and site-specificity during the 1990s. Focusing on two paradigmatic projects of the so-called participatory or socially engaged art realized for the Biennial’s final third edition (2002), Allora & Calzadilla’s Tiza and Francis Alÿs’s Cuando la fe mueve motañas, the article argues that the turn towards the social ultimately blurred the readibility of Lima as a site, necessary for the Biennial’s viability.
In Spanish and English. Please message me if you'd like to read it.
Also with texts by Javier Sánchez Martínez and Ronnie Yates.
This article considers an unsuccessful bid of the Peruvian capital, Lima, to enter into global networks of artistic exchange through a short-lived, ostensibly failed project: Lima Biennial of Latin American Art [Bienal Iberoamericana de Lima], held three times between 1997 and 2002. Aside from a collapse of the municipal cultural policies, the article attribues the “failure” to other, aesthetic and political factors that highlight the contradictions involved in exhibition-making. On the one hand, it discusses an impossibility of striking the unattainable perfect balance between “international” and “local” ingredients that would be legible and artistically satisfactory to both internal and external observers, which would have been crucial in the area long considered closed off from the rest of Latin America. On the other hand, it scrutinizes the biennial project in the light of the rapidly evolving understanding of site and site-specificity during the 1990s. Focusing on two paradigmatic projects of the so-called participatory or socially engaged art realized for the Biennial’s final third edition (2002), Allora & Calzadilla’s Tiza and Francis Alÿs’s Cuando la fe mueve motañas, the article argues that the turn towards the social ultimately blurred the readibility of Lima as a site, necessary for the Biennial’s viability.
In Spanish and English. Please message me if you'd like to read it.
Concentrating on two of the Bestias’ projects, Deshechos de Arquitectura (1984) and Lima – Utopía Mediocre (1987), I trace how the group’s ephemeral, makeshift proposals were crucial exercises in the grassroots efforts to reformulate the beliefs on who and how would have the access and the right to the city; to planning and to utilization of urban space. Taking the phrase “democracy building” as an architectural metaphor, I see the Bestias’ projects as decisive attempts to construct the city from the literal and metaphorical ground up, harnessing the energy of the emergent youth subcultures and the new migrant populations, during the time when such venture seemed least likely to occur. The collective rejected homogeneous entities proposed by the dominant ideologies, “Leninist-Maoist” revolution and neoliberal modernization. Instead the Bestias envisioned a collective body that operated on participatory, non-identitarian principles of subversive, pragmatic realism of an anarchist kind: a society that refused hegemonic powers and that did not strive to totalize itself.
Teresa Burga before and after the School of the Art Institute”
Dorota Biczel and Emilio Tarazona
At the end of the 1960s, due mostly to the pressures exerted by the radicalized student body, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) went through a decisive transformation. The 1968 Democratic Convention and the activities of the Weather Underground as well as the overall climate of the country also contributed to this upheaval, however, much of the demand for change came from foreign students, such as Peruvian Fulbright scholar, Teresa Burga (born Iquitos, 1935), one of the leading voices of her class. In 1969, SAIC revamped its curriculum, opening up narrowly defined departments, introducing seminars in new media, and allowing students to create their own courses of study with faculty consultation.
Burga came to Chicago as a leading member of Arte Nuevo (1966–69), a crucial Peruvian vanguard group, which had crystallized around the prominent critic and theorist, Juan Acha. Her 1968 arrival in Chicago coincided with the military coup of the general Velazco Alvarado in her native country and, at that point, the profound impact that her master’s studies at SAIC would have on her career could not be foreseen. Exposure to new ideas and theories, promoted in Chicago by visiting artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barry, Vito Acconci, and Dennis Oppenheim, introduced a radical shift in Burga’s own practice, leading her to abandon her experiments with pop art in favor of endeavors based around the utilization of text and new communication media. Her first ventures into this new realm took place on the pages of the 70 magazine, the key platform developed to host a variety of experimental, ephemeral, and utopian proposals that did not find an outlet in the city’s scene, dominated by the popular Chicago Imagists.
Paradoxically, however, upon her return to Peru in 1971, the ambitious and pioneering proposals that Burga had developed did not find resonance on the Peruvian scene under the cultural policy of populist nationalism. In this paper, we will focus on three of Burga’s mature projects, the installations Autorretrato. Estructura – Informe 9.6.72 / Self-portrait. Structure – Information 9.6.72 (1972); Cuatro Mensajes / Four Messages (1974); and Paisaje Urbano / Urban Landscape (1978), in order to trace how they conform and depart from the models proposed by the North American conceptualists. We hope that by tracing the particular “Chicago effect” in Burga’s work through a critical analysis of body, language, and public space, we can uncover a unique and viable proposal that had been obscured by the dominant views of the two crucial milieus of its emergence.
Through a close reading of key contemporary examples from the territories that Morawski and Acha respectively covered (Artur Żmijewski of Poland, Minerva Cuevas of Mexico, and Eduardo Villanes of Peru) , I will trace the effects and influence of the utopian Marxist thinking on its heterotopic successors. Who, where and why is willing to take up the radical claims of the past? How do the contemporary dematerialized artistic practices relate to their historic antecedents? And, finally, what does it mean to transform reality today, if its current state is at best liquid, if not simply vaporous? If we cannot aspire to utopia, what do we aim for in our post-Socialist condition?
For both projects at stake is the conception of Peruvian society as a whole – a heterogeneous social body capable of articulating its needs and desires. While the Maoist rebel group, Sendero Luminoso, constituted this society’s radical wing, its violent actions aimed at the social integrity, Fujimori’s authoritarian government was equally invested in eradicating those elements whose vision did not adhere its neoliberal doctrine. While the massacre had been ingeniously designed to destroy any material traces of the existence of the uncomfortable subjects seized at La Cantuta campus, to remove them from the official archive of the State, the artistic projects sought to re-establish the presence of the disappeared and reaffirm their physical existence against their forceful erasure from the social and historical corpus.
Nonlinear in structure, the book is full of flashbacks to the narrator’s youth in Peru. What is of interest in the excerpt below is an extremely condensed and evocative image of Lima at a tipping point when the city—according to many of its inhabitants—started “going to shit.” Following World War II, Lima experienced an uncontrolled (arguably still ongoing) demographic explosion, mostly due to internal migration from the rural areas of the country, which irrevocably changed its social and ethnic makeup, as well as its urban landscape. In section 17 of the book, Eielson sets up an irreconcilable tension between the old criollo Lima and the new indigenous Lima of the migrants; between the “white” (white dress, white shirt, white house, white lady, white Cadillac) and the “yellow” embodied by the clay from which the peripheral slums are constructed; between the progress envisioned by criollo capitalists, such as Giuliano, and the miserable poverty lived by indigenous peoples, such as Mayana, the protagonist’s romantic interest during his adolescence spent on a rural coffee plantation. It is a pessimistic vision in which the solution to the problems of the city is not a reform or development but a total cosmic catastrophe: a new flood that will clear the foundations for a new city.
The image of Lima that Eielson conjures in his book precipitates to some extent another famous archetype of the city: Lima, the horrible (Lima la horrible), coined by Eielson’s contemporary, the renowned journalist and intellectual, Sebastián Salazar Bondy (Lima, 1924-1965).
least 50% of its inhabitants. Not a day passes without at least one piece of news about violence against humans, usually against women. Every day women are tortured, raped, murdered; their bodies discarded like trash.
Since the early 2000s, “Ni una más”/“Ni una muerta más” has been the cry of activists in Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, demanding that this violence come to an end. Starting on June 3, 2015, when demonstrations broke out in major plazas across Argentina, that cry has been inverted as a way to refute the loss: “Ni una menos”–“Ni una mujer
menos.” The pace with which the #NiUnaMenos movement has gained momentum across the continent shows that no country is immune to the problem of femicide or to systemic gender-based violence. An international women’s strike with public demonstrations in fifty-four countries on March 8, 2017 attests to the violence’s catastrophic global dimension.
Considering this, we made a call to a group of theorists, artists, collectives, and curators (Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Octavio Zaya, Hellen Ascoli, Hsu Fang-Tze, Rían Lozano, Natalia Iguíñiz, Desperadas por el ritmo and Mónica Mayer) to think together about the importance of feminism and the still very present challenges of gender inequality in the art world. Together, their responses trace a map of radical stances. What follows makes most sense if all the individual texts are considered as a whole. We propose starting with the initial text, which formulates the questions that were envisaged as triggers, and then continuing with the polemic positions articulated in response.
This dossier is the second out of two instalments on Decolonization for the Buenos Aires's magazine ArteBA. The first instalment deals more specifically with decolonial issues. Find more at: https://www.academia.edu/35119379/Dossier_Descolonizaciones_Inciertas_Uncertain_Decolonizations
This dossier is the first out of two instalments on Decolonization for the Buenos Aires's magazine ArteBA. The second instalment deals more specifically with gender issues and the movement #NiUnaMenos. Find more at: https://www.academia.edu/35953129/Dossier_Descolonizaciones_Inciertas_II_NiUnaMenos_Uncertain_Decolonizations_II_NiUnaMenos
The University of Houston MA in Art History Program invites the international public to join us for a series of free online conversations on the topic of "Interrogating Global Contemporary Art: Research, Pedagogy, Museums," aimed at illuminating the idea of global contemporary art. Individual presentations by preeminent scholars and curators will highlight diverse approaches to shaping the notion of global contemporary art through research, pedagogy, exhibition-making, and public outreach. The series culminates in a Global Roundtable that reconvenes all speakers in dynamic group conversation.
We ask: What is global contemporary art and how is it remaking approaches to artistic practice, scholarship, and curation? In a moment of cultural reckoning that has rendered past efforts at diversifying and expanding the canon insufficient, how can the idea of global contemporary art help us to critically and ethically engage in the reconstruction of a historically exclusive discipline? As academic programs and museums adopt its rhetoric—along with its weaknesses and blindspots—is global contemporary art here to stay? Presented in a lively and engaging format, the series will examine the stakes of the global contemporary paradigm as scholars, educators, and curators urgently push to reinvent the discipline and its institutions.
David Joselit: October 8, 2:30pm CDT
Professor of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University
Mari Carmen Ramírez: October 13, 3pm CDT
Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Leah Dickerman: October 15, 2:30pm CDT
Director of Editorial and Content Strategy at The Museum of Modern Art
Atreyee Gupta: October 28, 2:30pm CDT
Assistant Professor of Global Modern Art and South and Southeast Asian Art at the University of California, Berkeley
Global Roundtable: November 9, 2pm CST
All events will be held on Zoom with limited capacity and pre-registration required. Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/interrogating-global-contemporary-art-research-pedagogy-museums-registration-123411211255
Simultaneous livestreams to the UH School of Art YouTube channel will be open to the public without pre-registration required: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC60EC9Gxw6jZQhcBj3S5tbg
Please visit the series website for further information, including details on how to join the conversations, access related readings, and receive any additional updates: https://uh.edu/kgmca/art/events/igca/
Organized by UH Art History faculty members Natilee Harren, Sandra Zalman, and Postdoctoral Fellow Dorota Biczel with support from the University of Houston Division of Research and with promotional support from Blaffer Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.