The inaugural ceremony of the 23rd Santa Cruz de la Sierra International Art Biennial was held on September 14. The competition will select 25 artists to participate in the exhibition that will follow the event. Likewise, from the 25 artists selected, 10 will be awarded. The biennial will center on the theme of Cruelty. The theme was proposed by curator Eduardo "Bluebox" Ribera. The theme was chosen based on letters and essays by Antonin Artaud and the musical video "Beat and the Pulse" by the singer Austra.
The international call includes the participation of artists from Colombia, Chile, New York, Mexico, Spain, Peru, and Argentina. Some of the artists invited to the event are: Regina Galindo (Guatemala), winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale; Germán Arrublade (Colombia), and Jorge Brantmayerde (Chile). An exhibition by Bolivians Claudia Joskowicz and Raquel Schwartz will open on the same day of the inauguration.
The artists selected are: Yennifer Cano, Andrés Felipe Castaño, Maquiamelo and Carlos Rojas-Verona, from Colombia; Amelia Campino-Ariztia, Melissa Vega-Muñoz, and Rodrigo Bruna, from Chile; Maximiliano Siñani and Ariana Page, from New York; Jesús Azpitarte-Almaguer, from Mexico; Gema Rupérez-Alonso, from Spain; Salim Morarji Ortiz-Grandez, from Peru; and Susana Barbará, Ananké Asseff, and María Causa, from Argentina. The Bolivian artists selected will be announced on the very day of the Biennial's inaugural ceremony.
In the context of the educational events offered at the Biennial, an entire month of exhibitions is scheduled at several cultural centers across the city. Likewise, a conference that took place Wednesday, September 12 at the Simón Ignacio Patiño Swiss-Bolivian Center centered on the theme of "Cruelty, an everyday occurrence between the artist and society." It included the participation of the following speakers: Loreto Buttazzoni, Amelia Errazuriz, María José Mir, Ángela Wilson, and Ernesto Muñoz. Another conference was held Monday, September 13, at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, with the participation of Spanish art theoretician and art critic, Miguel Cereceda.
The exhibition by Ana Carola Vargas, Jorge Brantmayer, and the group Desplazamiento de la Crueldad, opened on September 14—the day of the inaugural ceremony—alongside the screening of the short film entitled La Chirola by young Bolivian director Diego Mondacca.
A roundtable organized by the Fundación Campo Freudiano—that holds activities at the Patiño—was held on Saturday, September 15 to analyze the film Antichrist by Danish director Lars Von Trier. Also on this day, the Museo de Arte will offer a conference entitled Scatologies and Cruelties in Contemporary Art, with Ricardo Arcos-Palma, a Colombian art theoretician and art critic. Arcos-Palma is also of the international jury panel that also includes Ernesto Muñoz and Miguel Cereceda.
Noteworthy are, on one hand, the participation of Colombian Germán Arrubla, a guest artist who will create a multimedia installation (video and photographs) entitled Diet-Ética. There, dung beetles are shown devouring recent newspapers, as they underscore a scato-theological condition that belongs to a human existence influenced by politics; and, on the other, the participation of Maquiamelo who, revisiting his reduced heads inspired in the Jibaro tribes, reduces the head of Hitler and exposes it through photographs.