López and Valdés will reflect on their experiences organizing exhibitions that focus on the visual art and performance of Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, and will discuss how their curatorial research puts pressure on monolithic narratives about Central American art.
Curation as Research: Contemporary Art in Central America is an event hosted by the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley, and co-sponsored in part by the Departments of Spanish and Portuguese, History of Art, and Art Practice.
Curation as Research: Contemporary Art in Central America is the first program in a series of events this academic year focusing on arts practice as research.
Miguel A. López (1983) is a writer and researcher and the chief curator of TEOR/éTica in San José, Costa Rica. He curated “Fragile: Patricia Belli. Works, 1986–2015” (TEOR/éTica, 2016); “Teresa Burga: Structures of Air” (with Agustín Pérez Rubio, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, 2015); the section “God Is Queer” for the 31st Bienal de São Paulo (2014); and “Losing the Human Form: A Seismic Image of the 1980s in Latin America” (with Red Conceptualismos del Sur, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2012). He is cofounder of the independent art space Bisagra, active in Peru since 2014. He has written for periodicals such as Afterall, Manifesta Journal, E-flux Journal, Art in America, ArtNexus, and Art Journal. In 2016 he received the Independent Vision Curatorial Award from Independent Curators International (ICI), New York.
Emiliano Valdés (1980) is a curator, editor and cultural producer based in Medellin, Colombia and Guatemala City. He is currently Chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art , Medellin and Associate Curator for the 10th Gwangju Biennale. Until recently, he was Co-director of Proyectos Ultravioleta, a multifaceted platform for experimentation in contemporary art in Guatemala City and Curator/Head of Visual Arts at the Centro Cultural de España en Guatemala where over 5 years he developed an extensive exhibitions program that transformed the artistic scene of the country. In 2012, he was the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Curatorial Fellow at dOCUMENTA (13). Amongst his latest exhibitions are: “Serie Revisiones” at (Ex)Céntrico throughout all of 2011; ‘Mayami Son Machín’ at Gallery Diet in Miami; ‘Me asusta pero me gusta: Arte actual de Guatemala‘, at Diablo Rosso in Panamá City; ‘Hacer la historia’ at the Centro de Formación de la Cooperación Española en la Antigua Guatemala; ‘Campo&Ciudad’; ‘¡Progreso!’; ‘Esa historia a la vuelta de la esquina’; ‘Luis Camnitzer: Ideas para Instalar’; and ‘Pintura: El proyecto incompleto’, amongst others.
