In Spring 2024, the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA) is dedicating an archive presentation to Art Systems in Latin America, an exhibition of contemporary Latin American art that traveled to Antwerp, Brussels, London, Paris, and Ferrara in the years 1974-75. Jorge Glusberg, director of the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC) in Buenos Aires organized the exhibition in collaboration with Florent Bex, director of the International Cultural Centre (ICC) in Antwerp. Together with the artworks in the exhibition, some twenty Latin American artists traveled to Belgium. For several of them, this relocation marked the beginning of a fascinating journey through Europe during which new encounters and new places would leave a lasting impression on their work.
Drawing on a selection of archival documents, the presentation highlights the new forms of mobility introduced by this art in the mid-1970s. Aspects ranging from transportation, migration, portable art (systems) to political mobilization are framed within the broader artistic, institutional, and cultural-political context of the 1960s and 70s.
The archive presentation is curated by Ine Engels, Elize Mazadiego, Wouter Davidts, and the research group (Art in Belgium since 1945), Ghent University, with exhibition design by Kris Coremans (ssa/xx) and graphic design by Pauline Scharmann (M HKA).
The build-up was realized together with students in Art History (Pieter-Jan De Paepe, Anaclara De Vos), Engineering-Architecture (Floriane Kersters), Ghent University and Furniture Design (Emma Van der Aelst), Thomas More University of Applied Sciences.