Video Project, The given image

This edition of the Video Project brings together seven works by three Latin American artists who, through video art, examine the roles and stereotypes constructed by the apparatus of mass media, popular culture, and systems of power and inequality. They reveal how the place and role assigned to women, immigrants, and the idea of Peruvian identity are far from neutral.

On the one hand, Abigail Reyes, from El Salvador, draws from everyday language to reveal its political charge. In Sí Señor (2015–2016), the artist compiled hours of Latin American soap operas in which characters repeat the same phrase over and over again in an obedient, coquettish, and most often submissive manner, until it becomes empty noise. In To Be Secretary (2015), she operates in a similar way: the language of labor becomes a mirror of the structural machismo that the #MeToo movement began to name.

Elena Tejada-Herrera, a Peruvian artist, has spent decades interrogating the spaces that the Latin American body can—or cannot—occupy. Her works challenge notions of political correctness, exploring civil disobedience in a festive way and opening space for alternative forms of existence and relation. In Nouveau Bourgeois Latin American Immigrant Who Learned Shopping and Has Good Taste (2005), she appears in shopping malls and galleries in Virginia and New York wearing stereotypically bourgeois clothing and holding a sign that announces her condition as an immigrant: the contrast is ironic, self-aware, and generates discomfort. In Gallery Land Security (2007), she conducts random security checks at an opening, replicating the experience she herself faces as an immigrant every time she crosses an airport. In both works, the audience ceases to be a spectator and becomes part of the situation.

Angie Bonino, a Peruvian artist, works through the body, the city, and the collective imagination of Peru. Her three pieces take seemingly familiar images and destabilize them. In Yo quiero tener un millón de amigos (2007), she merges the icon of the black ski mask—inscribed in collective memory as an image of terror—with its use in traditional Andean dances, creating a vulnerable figure that dismantles fear through humor and sarcasm. In VISION Turistic–a (2014), a guided visit to Cerro San Cristóbal becomes a pretext for a reading of Lima: audio and video clips overlap in layers, as a metaphor for the socioeconomic and historical stratification accumulated in the city. In Evanescer (2010), a woman moves through a space suspended between the real and the subconscious, where desire and imagination emerge as forms of resistance against the limits imposed on femininity.

The three artists share a common strategy: humor and displacement as ways of dismantling what is established. They make evident how feminism operates by shifting things out of place, altering narratives that appear natural, and revealing that what is taken for granted is always a construction. Video, ephemeral and direct, becomes the ideal medium for this gesture: to interrupt, for a moment, the image that culture reproduces without questioning.