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Erika Diettes: Sudarios
September 25, 2016 to December 11, 2016
Colombian artist Erika Diettes draws upon her training as both an artist and an anthropologist by bringing forth work originating in the direct testimonies of the families of victims of decades of ongoing violence in her country, as well as in objects belonging to them. For her 2011 series Sudarios, she set up a studio in the province of Antioquia, a region that has endured intense violence. She interviewed at length and photographed women who had been forced to witness the torture and murder of their loved ones. As Diettes notes, 鈥淭he purpose of this kind of violence is not only to kill people, it鈥檚 to create witnesses, instill terror, and control a region.鈥 The resulting twenty photographs are intimate portraits of women reliving 鈥渢he moment that divided her life in two.鈥
Printed on silk panels over seven feet in height, the images take on a ghostly, ethereal quality that suggests the ways in which grief can leave people 鈥渁live, but not living.鈥 Appropriately, sudario is the Spanish word for 鈥渟hroud,鈥 especially a funerary cloak to cover a deceased body. But the word can also refer to the burial cloth of Christ to which, according to tradition, the image of Jesus鈥 face and body were miraculously transferred. The women become both protagonists and objects of study and contemplation, encompassing pain, loss and mourning. But more than being a testimonial to pain and death, the works also give evidence to life after horrific events. As the artist says, they are also 鈥渢estaments to dignity and to the twin desires of seeking justice and honoring the dead.鈥
Diettes displays her work in the (frequently poor and isolated) communities where her subjects live, for whom the work often becomes an instrument of mourning and healing. Most often the works are shown in churches, so that, in the words of Charles Guice, 鈥淒iettes elevates their burden to a spiritual one, their suffering acknowledged and dignified in that most sacred of spaces. The larger-than-life-scale overwhelms us, as if to suggest the enormity of the violence that lay hidden behind their eyes, and like martyrs seeking redemption, their presence invites us to share in their burden.鈥
At MOCRA鈥攐nly the third U.S. site where Sudarios had been exhibited鈥攖he twenty images were suspended from the nearly thirty-foot high ceiling of a building originally used as a chapel. MOCRA was honored to bring these works to St. Louis, a community in which many residents are also living with and addressing traumas both past and present. This exhibition was made possible through the generous assistance of Schneider Gallery, Chicago.
Erika Diettes (b. 1978) is a Colombian visual artist and social anthropologist who explores issues of memory, pain, absence, and death in a variety of mediums from her multidisciplinary perspective. Her work has been exhibited in unique spaces linked to re-memoration processes developed by the victims' movements in Colombia as well as at other venues, including the Museums of Modern Art of Bogot谩, Cali, Medell铆n, and Baranquilla in Colombia, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago de Chile, at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Fotofest Biennial in Houston, the Festival de la Luz in Buenos Aires, the Ballarat Foto Biennale in Australia, the Malta Festival in Pozn谩n, Poland, and at CENTER in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Museo de Antioquia (Colombia) and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, as well as important public and private collections in Colombia and the United States.
My work is inspired by the extremely complex social, political, and cultural situation that exists in Colombia, along with theoretical questions raised by my reaction to the unrelenting violence that my country has experienced for decades. I have decided to bear witness to that violence, and to give the victims鈥攂oth those murdered and disappeared and their survivors鈥攙oice through my art. | Erika Diettes
above:
Installation view of Erika Diettes: Sudarios at MOCRA, 2016. Photo by Jeffrey Vaughn.
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