ExhibitionSeptember 24, 2020· By Viviana Saavedra
Adriana Bustos: Bestiario de India’s (Bestiary of India’s) at Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires
Adriana Bustos (Bahía Blanca, 1965) exhibits her work in the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires. Once again, her work addresses the complex relationships between History and its tendentious or unfinished interpretations. In this case, the theme focuses on the chronicles narrated during the 16th century about the “New World.”
The work takes the name of Bestiario de India’s (Bestiary of India’s), a large-format work (200 x 200 cm) made in acrylic, gouache, and silver leaf on canvas. It is a planisphere inhabited by fantastic beings, many of them are part human and part animal, they coexist in the same space but do not show signs of interrelation. Rather each one, or the small groups in which they are found together, they seem to relate only with fragments of histories, like comic strips scattered randomly in a world where relationships fail to establish themselves. As a child, Adriana Bustos wanted to be a cartoon illustrator; drawing was her favorite technique, and she liked to invent characters. And some of that is present in Bestiary of India’s, many of the expressions of these monstrous inhabitants of a new world could be sketches of characters destined to be the protagonists of an animated film.
Originating in the Middle Ages, Bestiaries were primitive natural history manuals that included fabulous animals. They were both encyclopedias and places where moralizing stories were written. The artist’s gaze emphasizes History’s veracity, removing it from the place of universal and totalizing discourse. The statements of history, she writes, “are also strategic voids in the sense that those same voids open a space that makes identification and appropriation possible at the subject level.” According to the artist’s words, the spaces that are left empty in this historical account give rise to contradictions, chimeras, dream places, unconscious territories, and hallucinations.
On the Parque de la Memoria website, you can access the images of the work, as well as a video in which you can see details of the work and in which the artist reads her own text concerning her practice.
(https://parquedelamemoria.org.ar/multimedia/bestiario-de-indias-de-adriana-bustos/)
The work takes the name of Bestiario de India’s (Bestiary of India’s), a large-format work (200 x 200 cm) made in acrylic, gouache, and silver leaf on canvas. It is a planisphere inhabited by fantastic beings, many of them are part human and part animal, they coexist in the same space but do not show signs of interrelation. Rather each one, or the small groups in which they are found together, they seem to relate only with fragments of histories, like comic strips scattered randomly in a world where relationships fail to establish themselves. As a child, Adriana Bustos wanted to be a cartoon illustrator; drawing was her favorite technique, and she liked to invent characters. And some of that is present in Bestiary of India’s, many of the expressions of these monstrous inhabitants of a new world could be sketches of characters destined to be the protagonists of an animated film.
Originating in the Middle Ages, Bestiaries were primitive natural history manuals that included fabulous animals. They were both encyclopedias and places where moralizing stories were written. The artist’s gaze emphasizes History’s veracity, removing it from the place of universal and totalizing discourse. The statements of history, she writes, “are also strategic voids in the sense that those same voids open a space that makes identification and appropriation possible at the subject level.” According to the artist’s words, the spaces that are left empty in this historical account give rise to contradictions, chimeras, dream places, unconscious territories, and hallucinations.
On the Parque de la Memoria website, you can access the images of the work, as well as a video in which you can see details of the work and in which the artist reads her own text concerning her practice.
(https://parquedelamemoria.org.ar/multimedia/bestiario-de-indias-de-adriana-bustos/)
