Exhibition of Latin American Photography Shows the Work of Emerging Latin Photographers

Exhibition of Latin American Photography Shows the Work of Emerging Latin Photographers

Brazilian photographer Alvaro Villela poses in fron of his work, entitled Rostros (Faces), that forms part of an exhibition, entitled Peso y Levedad (Weight and Lightness), at the Cervantes Institute in Madrid, Spain. Villela's work is presented as part of the official selection of the PhotoEspana 2011, along with the work of 15 young Latin American artists. EPA/JAVIER LIZON.

MADRID.- Continuing a project from past years, the Instituto Cervantes presents an exposition of fifteen young Latin American photographers selected after a showing of their portfolios at the Trasatlántica Festival organized by PHotoEspaña and Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and Development (AECID), convened in Managua and Cartagena de Indias. The curators Rosina Cazali and Laure Terré have selected the work of 15 artists who reflect on the duality of heaviness and lightness, gravity and resistance, anxiety and hope. The photographs and the means used to produce them suggest this duality in an unavoidable way; the relationship between heaviness and lightness is always in tension, an eternal contradiction, and it affects the individual, as she is subject to the contemplation and digestion of images. The phenomena of mass information trigger the representation of pain. Photographs printed in newspapers, images transmitted by television or the internet, and the photographic (or visual) surveillance in airports or building entrances provoke a state of alertness and yet also defenselessness. The exhibition invites one to reflect on and return to the different realities of geographic and mental space, conceived in Latin American terms, through the lens of artists whose common interest is to suggest a continuous movement between the two extremes of heaviness and lightness. For all the gravity, extremity, and weightiness of some of the images, a lightness surfaces as well, inviting us to recover a critical sense of the resistance and utopianism present in humanism. The realities and situations on display compel reflection; some distress and frighten, while others generate hope. This passage, between heaviness and lightness, is present in four distinct moments under the signs of threat, failure, violence, and utopias. The show join together the work by the artists Eunice Adorno, Daniel Ramón Baca, Ricardo Barcellos, Mayerling García, Santiago Hafford, Diego Levy, Pedro Linger, Myriam Meloni, Pedro Motta, José Ernesto Muñiz, Mauricio Palos, Leonardo Ramírez, José Luis Rodríguez, Juan Toro and Álvaro Villela.  A visitor looks at a work, entitled Fragil (Fragile), by Argertinian photographer Muriam Meloni. EPA/JAVIER LIZON.