These Latin American artists navigate this tumultuous year's tensions in their new works

  Nature, visions, and reimagining the gaze in 2020

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With social instability and political turmoil flaring up around the globe, 2020 will be remembered as being a portal to a new age. Between cloudy skies and unstable ground, with the privations of physical isolation coupling with overwhelming digital connectivity, we find ourselves groping through a fog that has altered our understanding of the human condition. Our former orientation and reference points have lost meaning as the parameters have shifted alarmingly.


	From bodies going through intense transformation to material and spiritual distortions experienced from different perspectives, the artworks made during the past months in locations across Latin America, in ever-more-trying environments, reflect their contexts.
In Gede (2020), Myrlande Constant (<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/events/detail/17401/Portrait-Self-Portrait">Central Fine</a>) presents the powers of death and fertility in unison. Her flag – a sacred object honoring entities – depicts the Gede, the family of loa spirits from Haitian voudou, and what they bring with them. In a cemetery surrounded by an exuberant tropical landscape, we see a myriad of ecological relationships involving flying bats, skulls and bones, religious artifacts, gravestones, and festivities full of music, vigorous dancing, playful tricks, and sensual acts. The artist frames the symbolism of this tradition, intermingling it with humor and contemporary culture. In a year marked by death, she elaborates on what it means to be alive in tune with the expanded dimensions, praising the deceased and celebrating the regeneration of life.

An array of&nbsp;colors and life-forms is also at the core of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/13852/Sonia-Gomes" target="_blank">Sonia Gomes</a>’s&nbsp;Untitled&nbsp;(2005–2020), shown by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/events/detail/17453/Mendes-Wood-DM-at-Ten-Years" target="_blank">Mendes Wood DM</a> – a multi-year creative process being typical of the artist’s method. Found textiles and other materials are worked on through the sensitive practices of stitching and binding. Through her multidimensional abstract structures, composed of everyday elements and their inherent memories – which reclaim and, in turn, reinvent Afro-Brazilian traditions and feminine crafts – Gomes concocts a choreography for histories and subjectivities.

Emerging from Florencia Rodriguez Giles’s Biodélica (2020) comes a moving, amorphous being, a pencil work on paper presented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/events/detail/17376/Slow-motion-Catastrophe" target="_blank">Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte</a>. Part human, part floral and faunal, part undefined, a chimera of our times passes by. As a counterpoint to a desert world, the exuberant, erotic mutant inhabits a voluptuous body that is unrestricted by genetic boundaries. Its ever-changing form, which cannot be captured by established identities and silhouettes, expresses its inner free-flowing mystery.

In Poça (2020), meanwhile, the London-born Colombian artist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/23332/Carolina-Caycedo" target="_blank">Carolina Caycedo</a> (represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/events/detail/17488/Natural-World" target="_blank">Instituto de Visión</a>) has nature take the form of a metaphysical commentary on the materiality of water. The circular shape of a puddle reflects the image of its surroundings and, at the same time, gazes back at us. It’s an existence aware of its fundamental relationship with its environment. An enigmatic eye bristling with dense energy, alert in these times of fragile balances.

Murky waters as a metaphor for what we have been living through finds a high point in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/19979/Regina-Jos%C3%A9-Galindo" target="_blank">Regina José Galindo</a>’s photograph Die Feier (2020), shown by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/events/detail/17552/Regina-Jos%C3%A9-Galindo-and-Zehra-Do%C4%9Fan" target="_blank">Prometeo Gallery di Ida Pisani</a>. A couple in formal dress but with bare feet waltzes in a muddy landscape, exposed, dirty, and weaker with each step. An image of a world full of abysmal contradictions and increasing collapses.

Approaching this sense of dystopia from a digital perspective,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7964/Adri%C3%A1n-Villar-Rojas" target="_blank">Adrián Villar Rojas</a> revisits his first work, which dates back to 2003: Counter Strike (2003–2020), a compilation of prints from a canonical multiplayer first-person shooter video game, also presented by Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte. Beyond its violence between terrorists vs. counter-terrorists, Villar Rojas focuses on a situation that occurs when a player is killed and able to wander above the game’s scenarios, operating ‘a conquering gaze from nowhere,’ to cite Donna Haraway. Through this, the artist highlights how, under the cloak of objectivity, supposedly neutral and non-subjective participation in the world hides unequivocally dominant positions. ‘Vision is always a question of the power to see – and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices. With whose blood were my eyes crafted?’ writes Haraway.Counter Strike compels us to reflect upon a crisis of unmediated presence. In a commodified world, citizens have become mere users of services, goods, and transaction devices, delegating body and life to external instances while exiled from the genuine experiences of exchanging and inhabiting. Although initiated in the early years of the millennium, Villar Rojas’s work provides a timely commentary on our contemporary condition, which, as he demonstrates, is always rooted in and oriented by many given vertical forces.&nbsp;

'OVR: Miami Beach' opens November 2, 10am ET for invited VIPs. Public days will follow from Friday, December 4 through Sunday, December 6, 12 midnight ET.Top image:&nbsp;Myrlande Constant, Gede (detail), 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Central Fine, Miami.

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These Latin American artists navigate this tumultuous year's tensions in their new works