GRIMM is pleased to announce the recent acquisition of Claudia Martínez Garay's Muy blanco para indio y muy poco para blanco / Too white for a cholo, not enough for a white man (2020) by the Denver Art Museum, CO (US). This is the first acquisition of the artist's work by the museum.
In her artistic work, Claudia Martínez Garay explores symbolic translations of exoticization, resentment, and the schizophrenic perception of indigenous peoples of the Andes. While cultural artifacts from the Incas shape the region’s ethnographic and visual memory, their descendants are still exposed to various forms of racism in the present. The starting point of the work Muy blanco para indio y muy poco para blanco / Too white for a cholo, not enough for a white man (2020) is this line from the film Túpac Amaru, in which Amaru—the last Inca monarch and fighter against the Spanish invasion in the sixteenth century—defines his own identity as mestizo. “His body and soul was as brown as white, Amaru himself was the embodiment of the contradictions, and the gathering of the two worlds that until this moment cannot recognize and reconcile themselves as Peruvian inhabitants.”, explains Claudia Martínez Garay. Like Anton Wilhelm Amo, Amaru was affected by discrimination, Christianization, and colonization; like Amo, Amaru spoke Latin fluently, among other languages, and so both sought to use their means to revolt against colonial oppression and a lack of acceptance.
The installation is based on historical and current representations from textbooks, museum catalogues, and archaeological journals. The illustrations have been reproduced in various shades of clay. Combined, they form a kind of mental map in which a variety of systems of symbols and images, ideas and ideologies enter into new relationships and address the prevalent mechanisms of exclusion and the representation of power. In doing so, Martínez Garay investigates how a canon of images influences cultural identity and which new compositions can be used to speculate about alternative historiographies and future utopias.
Exhibition history:
The Faculty of Sensing -Thinking With, Through and by Anton Wilhelm Amo. Kunstverein, Braunschsweig (DE), 28 March – 13 September, 2020
The Faculty of Sensing -Thinking With, Through and by Anton Wilhelm Amo, SAVVY Contemporary, 4 December, 2020 – 28 February, 2021
