Claudia Martínez Garay investigates the relationships of images and cultural artifacts with memory and history. Martínez Garay’s The Creator is inspired by the Mochicas’ belief in the afterlife, and who considered important and necessary the exchange of life and death in order to survive. Moche civilization collapsed by extended flood and drought around 800-900 a.c. (after christ) when El Niño phenomena happened at that time. The installation references an unexcavated site where warrior and animal portraits rest and sleep alongside printed cutouts of native plants- the ceramic pieces are replicas of real ceramics that were looted from Peru and sold to museums abroad, where they are kept at this moment.
Claudia Martínez Garay (b. 1983, Ayacucho, Peru) lives and works in Amsterdam. Her work deals with the socio-political memory and history of Peru and its relationship with un/official visual archives such as propaganda, iconography and popular imagery from which she speculates and questions the past within her installations and videos. Recent solo exhibitions include ¡Kachkaniraqkun! / ¡Somos aún! / ¡We are, still!, Nova Section, Art Basel Miami (2018); I WILL OUTLIVE YOU. Grimm Gallery, New York (2018). Groups exhibitions include Taming Y/Our Passion, Aichi Triennial, Japan (2019); 12th Shanghai Biennale, Proregress—Art in an Age of Historical Ambivalence, Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2018); 4th New Museum Triennial, Songs for Sabotage, New Museum, New York (2018).
EXHIBITED WORKS
The Creator, 2019
Installation (twenty clay pieces, three sublimation print on aluminium)
250 × 500 × 500 cm
Courtesy the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam | New York.
Presented with the support of GRIMM Amsterdam | New York.
