Juan Manuel Echavarria, La "O", 2010, C-print, 40 x 50 inches

Juan Manuel Echavarría

 

La “O”

 

February 17 – March 26, 2011

Opening Reception: Thursday, February 17 from 6 to 8pm

 

 

Josée Bienvenu Gallery is pleased to present La “O” an exhibition of new photographs by Juan Manuel Echavarría. Since 1995, Echavarría’s disturbingly beautiful photographs and videos address the dread and human waste of the endless drug wars in Colombia. Each successively brutal cycle since the 1950s has devolved the country toward a national psychosis of violence, a state of mind where mass murder, forced displacements and fear have become the fabric of daily life.

 

Juan Manuel Echavarría’s work gives a voice to the voiceless, the thousands of farmers that have been massacred and displaced from their homes. Over the past two years, he has embarked on multiple journeys through the rural region of Montes de Maria, ravaged by the war between the leftist guerilla and the paramilitaries in collaboration with the Colombian army. Over the course of long expeditions through inaccessible and muddy roads in the remote mountains, Echavarría has encountered many villages left abandoned by the war.

 

The title of the exhibition, La “O” refers to the absent vowel on a blackboard in one of the abandoned schools. The letters “a, e, i, u” are written in faint but still legible chalk, as the classroom was probably evacuated in the middle of a reading lesson. The missing “O” resonates in the silence of the deserted place. Silencio I, II, III are photographs of blank and derelict blackboards all carrying their singularity in the various degrees of the peeling paint, while Lo Bonito es Estar Vivo (The Beautiful Thing is to be Alive) is the image of a blackboard with this actual inscription.

 

Some of the works are titled after fragments of conversation with the people of the village of Mampujan whose entire population was displaced ten years ago: Nos Vinimos el Tronco, se Quedaron las Raices (We Took the Trunk, the Roots Stayed); Desenterar y Hablar (Unburying and Speaking). On March 11, 2010, the people came back for a day of commemoration of the displacement. Juan Manuel Echavarría photographed the objects, a vase of flowers, a carpet, placed by the villagers in the ruins of their former homes for the occasion.

 

El Testigo 3 (The Witness 3), 2010, references an earlier image, El Testigo, 1998, of a ghostly white horse standing in a vast and empty landscape. Here, in El Testigo 3, the “witness” is a young calf in the middle of a classroom, facing the camera with bewildered eyes. Emaciated, though the grass is green in the classroom converted into a field, the calf speaks for the absent children. Through his own fragility, the calf is a witness of the forced displacement of the population, of the children caught in war.

 

Born in Medellín, Colombia, Juan Manuel Echavarría lives and works in New York and Bogotá. His work has been exhibited extensively through Latin America, Europe and the United States. This is his third solo show at Josée Bienvenu Gallery.   Recent exhibitions include: For Love Not Money, 15^th Tallinn Print Triennial Requiem NN, Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia  (2011); fast forward 2: The Power of   Motion, Media Art Sammlung Goetz, ZKM, Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany (2010); Changing the Focus: Latin American Photography 1990 – 2005, Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA (2010); Once more, with feeling: Recent photography from Colombia, The Photographer’s Gallery, London, UK  (2008); Death and the River, Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York, NY (2008); The Disappeared, El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY (2007); Juan Manuel Echavarría: Mouths of Ash, Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, NM (2007); Juan Manuel Echavarría: Mouths of Ash, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC  (2006); Bocas de Ceniza, Guerra y Pa and Bandeja de Bolivar, Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (2006);The Witness, Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York, NY (2006); Documentary Fortnight, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2005); La Trama e l’Ordito, Venice Biennale, Latin American Pavilion, Italy (2005); Cantos cuentos colombianos, Part II, Daros-Latin America, Zurich, Switzerland (2005). His work is included in prestigious collections such as: The Goetz Collection, Fundacion Cisneros, The Daros Collection; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires; Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogota; The North Dakota Museum Art.

Juan Manuel Echavarria, Lo Bonito Es Estar Vivo, C-print, 31 x 60 inches