Archive Reinventions: Image, History, and Memory in Beatriz González's Art Work

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Published: Sep 22, 2019
Keywords:
Beatriz González, press archive, artistic intervention, political history, collective memory.

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Martín Ruiz Mendoza
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Abstract

This essay explores the historical critique that Beatriz González has articulated from the 1980s based on the aesthetic elaboration of press images. After analyzing the political turn that can be attested in her pictorial approach to the current national affairs from that decade onwards, the essay examines the mechanisms used by the artist to activate a process of collective memory which stems from the aesthetic intervention of press images depicting war victims in Colombia. The pictorial reinvention of those images elicits reflection about the relationship between the archive, art and memory at the current juncture.

Article Details

Issue
Vol. 54 (2019)
Section
Articles
Author Biography

Martín Ruiz Mendoza, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Martín Ruiz Mendoza holds a B.A. in Languages and Sociocultural Studies and an M.A. in Philosophy from Los Andes University. He is now a PhD candidate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, where he has taught, among others, introductory courses on Hispanic literature and cinema. He has been awarded a University of Michigan International Institute Fellowship and a Rackham Humanities Fellowship in support of his current research project about Colombian contemporary cultural production.