Globalization: Voluspa Jarpa’s Altered Views and The Hegemonic Museum
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2023-10-30
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Bloomsbury Publishing
Abstract
The spatial politics of museums and art biennials are often invoked in discourses and debates regarding the cultural and geopolitical forces of globalization. For example, Paul O’Neill observed that, on the cusp of the twenty-first century, biennials became a transformative force of international curatorial practice and ‘a contemporary global phenomenon’ that ‘succeeded in providing models of resistance to the hegemonic powers of Western art history, museums, and established art institutions’ (2012: 51, 85). The historical legacies of one of the most well-established biennials, the Venice Biennale, exemplify the ongoing contestations and conflicts of global-local discourses, which are manifest in the Biennale’s national pavilions but also in its status as a high-profile platform for ‘world art’ and for the art world. As will be discussed below, contemporary interventions by the Biennale’s artistic directors such as Okwui Enwezor have introduced art from diverse geographies and cultural contexts beyond their traditional European remit. In doing so, they also aimed to complicate global-local binaries that positioned the Biennale either as a global exhibition or as a vestige of national representation. Enwezor’s theme for the 2015 Biennale, All the World’s Futures, not only embraced a more complex spatio-temporal terrain of contemporary art, it also intersected with art discourses and museum debates regarding decolonization and social justice. For the Chile Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Chilean artist Voluspa Jarpa seized upon the frictions of the Biennale as both a global platform for ‘world art’ and as a site for national representation by interrogating the epistemologies and legacies of European hegemonic museums and simultaneously asserting the emancipatory voices of art from Chile. Jarpa’s Altered Views unfolds in a series of three installations: The Hegemonic Museum, The Subaltern Portraits Gallery, and The Emancipating Opera. Rather than offering an overview of the contested art histories of globalization, this chapter argues that Jarpa’s project provides an ‘altered view’ that refracts various constellations of globalized, hegemonic discourse, which emerged in Europe, through an analytical lens and ‘reversed cultural space’ that is created within the context of the Venice Biennale and its contested politics of national representation (Pavilion of Chile 2019)
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Book chapter
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This accepted book chapter is published as Rectanus, M.W., Globalization: Voluspa Jarpa’s Aletred Views and The Hegemonic Museum. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music and Art (2024) Bloomsbury Academic, 2023, section IV (Chptr 14);215-230. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501377747.ch-014. Posted with permission.