The Disappeared

March 29 – June 5, 2005

Catalog published by Charta and the North Dakota Museum of Art. Written and edited by Reuter with Preface by Lawrence Weschler

Funded by the Otto Bremer Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Lannan Foundation

“To disappear” was newly defined during the twentieth century military dictatorships in Latin America. “Disappear” evolved into a transitive verb describing those considered threats to the State who were kidnapped, tortured, and killed by their own military, especially in the 1970s in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay.

The Disappeared brings together the work of twenty-seven living artists from South America who, over the course of the last thirty years, have made art about los desaparecidos or the disappeared. These artists have lived through the horrors of the military dictatorships that rocked their countries in the mid-decades of the twentieth century. Some worked in the resistance; some had parents or siblings who were disappeared; others were forced into exile. The youngest were born into the aftermath of those dictatorships. And still others live in countries maimed by endless civil war. Disappearance was inevitably linked to torture. Laurel Reuter, curator of the exhibition and director of the North Dakota Museum of Art, was struck by the timelessness and truthfulness of the art. For example, when Identidad, a collaborative installation made by thirteen Argentinean artists, opened in Buenos Aires, three people discovered their long-hidden identities. They had been taken at birth from those who opposed the government and adopted into military families. Through their art, these artists fight amnesia in their own countries as a stay against such atrocities happening again.

Artists in exhibition:

Marcelo Brodsky, Argentina

Luis Camnitzer, Uruguay, lives in New York

Arturo Dulcos, Chile

Juan Manuel Echavarría, Colombia

Antonio Frasconi, Uruguay, lives in New York

Nicolas Guagnini , Argentina, lives in New York

Sara Maneiro , Venezuela

Cildo Meireles, Brazil

Oscar Muñoz, Colombia

Ivan Navarro , Chile, lives in New York

Luis Gonzáles Palma, Guatemala, lives in Argentina

Ana Tiscornia Uruguay, lives in New York

Fernando Traverso, Argentina

Collaborative work by Argentinean artists Carlos Alonso, Nora Aslán, Mireya Baglietto, Remo Bianchedi, Diana Dowek, León Ferrari, Rosana Fuertes, Carlos Gorriarena, Adolfo Nigro, Luis Felipe Noé, Daniel Ontiveros, Juan Carlos Romero & Marcia Schvartz.