Claudia Martínez Garay: Sovereignty Over a Ghost Kingdom
Installation view of Ghost Kingdom, GRIMM Gallery, 9 September - 15 October 2022. Left: Chunka Pacha, 2022, Tufting. 250 x 156 cm (98 3/8 x 61 3/8 in.) Middle: Chunka Suqtayuq Pacha, 2022, Tufting. 250 x 156 cm (98 3/8 x 61 3/8 in.) Right: Chunka Kimsayuq Pacha, 2022, Tufting. 250 x 156 cm (98 3/8 x 61 3/8 in.)
Throughout Martínez Garay's work, history becomes reconfigured into spectacular hybrid forms. Constellations of national symbols ranging from pre-Columbian artefacts to civil war imagery collapse the past and present, producing composite and nonlinear narratives of the region’s social history, indigenous vernacular, and material culture. Her most recent project and exhibition Ghost Kingdom at GRIMM gallery was a riot of color, pattern, and texture embellished with ancient and culturally resonant symbols of the Andes. The artist continues her engagement with forgotten narratives and legacies of colonialism that continue to haunt her home country. Overlapping claims of territorial dominion and the long line of overturned systems of oppression in the Andean region—a “Ghost Kingdom” as appointed by Martínez Garay—inject a certain criticality into the question of internal sovereignty: how can one constitute oneself and be the author and owner of one’s own history?
Although Garay’s installations and sculptures feel personal and reflective of her Andean heritage, they are without specific autobiographical references. The ongoing Pachas (2020-) series is named after the organization of the cosmos into three distinct but overlapping and interacting realms in Inca mythology. The Pacha concept is both spatial and temporal and it might be better understood as tiempo-espacio or world-moment. They are abridged by physical structures of nature like caves and mountains, semi-mythical spectacles like lighting and rainbows, and temporal overlaps among past, present, and future. Each of Martínez Garay’s tapestries contains an assemblage of symbols whose associations are at once specific and universal.
Claudia Martínez Garay, Chunka Tawayuq Pacha (2022), Tufting. 250 x 156 cm (98 3/8 x 61 3/8 in)
For her most recent project Ghost Kingdom, Martínez Garay’s monumental triptych of tuft compositions from the Pacha series anchored the gallery, visualizing composite landscapes scattered with motifs reminiscent of South American craft traditions, ecology, religious systems, and social history. In the case of Chunka Pacha (2022), a pair of hands—tied at the wrist by a system of rope, hanging vegetation, and an unwinding yo-yo—open a peasecod to reveal a sanguine and gastric inner structure. Chunka Suqtayuq Pacha (2022) reimagines the crucifixion of Jesus against an Andean mountainscape, with an overlaid map of trails connecting Punto de observación en la latitud del Cuzco and Líneas a los dioses. A second crowned figure, reminiscent of the monumental carved stones of Andean men in La morada de los Dioses, stares solemnly ahead, weeping cacao-shaped tears cultivated by an outstretched hand and basket. The piece foregrounds the regional affliction effected by colonial resource extraction and its religious imagery counterbalances native and imported systems of faith.
On a separate wall, Chunka Tawayuq Pacha (2022) images a system of regional symbols branching outwards and upwards from a foregrounded llama: cacao fruit and other flora exemplify the products of Andean agriculture economies, a perched butterfly alludes to the species’ migratory patterns, and a skull and blindfolded infant recall the human lifecycle–all fused together like suspended strands of a genealogy tree. Recontextualizing historical, cultural, and popular references, the piece visualizes the heavy load of Andean history carried by the emblematic Andean pack animal: a complicated network of the pervasive effects of colonialism that are inextricably intertwined with the life-affirming vitality and natural resources of the Andes.
Claudia Martínez Garay, Ghost Kingdom, 2022. Painted wall mural, Sublimated print on aluminum (9 parts), steel stand (6 parts) 505.5 x 472.4 x 292.1 cm (199 x 186 x 115 in.) (approx.)
A number of mixed media installations feature industrial materials like steel and aluminum, bringing to the fore discourses of uneven modernity, extractivist development, and modern warfare in the Andean region. The show’s eponymous art piece Ghost kingdom (2022) features an elaborately patterned wall mural as the background to academic drawings of native flora—namely, Am Agivito, Agavote, and a third Dicen los Cronistas (planta nativa)— printed on aluminum panels and placed throughout the gallery, figuring the colonial and artificial classification of ecology. Little Questions to the ground (2022) pairs images of guerrilla warfare with multiple allusions to field work, printed on large steel plates. Individuals arm themselves with tools of cultivation like machete knives and instruments of resistance music like guitars, while framed by broken metal chains and a raised fist, the global system of protest. Martínez Garay conceptualizes these images beyond their initial modes of resistance and subjugation and considers instead how they foster community and collective agency.
These mixed media assemblages expertly navigate a myriad of ancient history and recent memory of Martínez’s native Peru, evoking a layered history of the region. Syncretic in their form and meaning, these assemblages visualize composite representations of memory that challenge straightforward, restrictive, and hegemonic narratives. According to the artist,
“The ideas behind Andean cosmovision are too complex to grasp in one work, so I decided to work in a series, each of them as an approach to what I read or speculate from the past. There are many cultures that I’m interested in, and it’s important to understand the very different civilizations that existed, one on top of the other, invading and conquering each other, and then all conquered by the Incas before being colonized and their culture erased by Spaniards and later suffering terrorism by the Shining Path group, not in a specific timeline but jumping to different moments because that is how I relate and learn from history.”¹
Martínez Garay's pairing of temporally distinct but denotatively related images of Peru adhere to the Pacha notion of compressing space and time. The medium of assemblage materializes the layering of multiple histories into a single image, and the process of tufting symbolically weaves together the myriad of stories into a material object. Chunka Kimsayuq Pacha (2022) illustrates an attempt at defining and mapping connections between (a) and (b) into a logical system. The artwork centers the ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies of classification schemes—famously noted by Jorge Luis Borges in “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins”.² Her hybrid images bring to the fore the thematic resonances of social upheaval and self-realization across the nation's history: Martínez Garay reproduces and reconfigures symbols of Andean history and identity to produce “powerful non-linear, auto-narratives of a culture constantly mediating its interrupted pasts,” encompassing both destabilization and resilience in the aftermath of colonialism, dictatorship, and civil war.³
Claudia Martínez Garay, La Llama, 2021. Ceramic 7.6 x 5.1 x 5.1 cm (3 x 2 x 2 in) (approx.).
Jonca de chelas, 2021. Ceramic 5.1 x 5.1 x 5.1 cm (2 x 2 x 2 in) (approx.)
Spectacular in scale and colour, the tufted works and mixed media installations represent an exercise in reclaiming symbols of the past through alternative methods of storytelling. The ceramic works, however—calm, intimate, and miniature—strike a markedly different note. If the assemblages and Pachas series are monumental in their historical subject and physical scale, then the miniature clay figurines are more intimate portraits of the everyday. Perhaps this configuration emulates the grades of scale that separate a people from its grand mythologies, or celebrates the contemporary mundane with stirring images of Andean life without relying on spectacle and monumentality, which figure heavily in the ideation of myth and lore.
Claudia Martínez Garay, A light that will never go out, 2020.
A light that will never go out (2020) marks the optimistic and uplifting inflection of the artist’s reimaging of Andean history. It offers a romantic vision of the Andes mountains, warmly lit by a clear-skied sunset, as a timeless, untouched, and unchanging landscape. Martínez Garay's procedures of assemblage also point to the opposite. Her compositions, and the narratives they communicate, are ultimately a construction of discrete parts that often reference instances of social upheaval. In thematic and visual ways, Martínez is working from rupture and her work gesture towards the fragmentary. It thus bears examining to what degree these pieces emphasize a kind of unmaking as integral to imagining alternative models for theorizing history that avoid the extremes of the overly pessimistic and overly optimistic.
Claudia Martínez Garay, El Creador, 2019. Soil, clay objects, sublimation prints on aluminum. Various dimensions. 16th Istanbul Biennial: the Seventh Continent, Istanbul.
El Creador (2019) deepens this paradox. At the 15th Istanbul Biennial, Replica ceramic figurines of looted objects from the pre-Columbian Moche civilization, known for its elaborate ceramics and pottery, are arranged in a soil mound. The installation symbolically—by proxy of ceramic copies—returns these looted items to an excavation context, reminding us on whose soil they originated. An earlier work, … Maywanpas quidakuwakmi ... / ... but you can stay with my stuff ... (2017), similarly addresses the modern ownership and circulation of artifacts. A scattered system of silhouetted limbs, clay biomorphic figures, and woven textiles emblematize the systemic displacement of Andean cultural heritage into foreign collections, offering a fractured and disarticulated mapping of the region’s cultural heritage and identity. Both works are deeply affective displays of the extraction of pre-Columbian artifacts, raising the question of how a region can have ownership over its ancient past if it does not have a claim over its dislocated material culture.
Claudia Martínez Garay. Chunka Hukniyuq Pacha, 2022. Tufting. 250 x 156 cm | 98 3/8 x 61 3/8 in
Claudia Martínez Garay. Chunka Kimsayuq Pacha, 2022. Tufting. 250 x 156 cm | 98 3/8 x 61 3/8 in
Martínez Garay presents culture in its most raw forms: symbols, vernacular language, artifacts, religious and spiritual beliefs, and values that are a central part of a society, yet often intelligible and difficult to articulate plainly. Martínez's boldly colored and geometric framing devices—present along the border of the tufted compositions or painted in large mural form directly onto the wall—suggest a preoccupation with the presentation of visual narratives. The graphic shading and sharp lines of the frames create the illusion of three-dimensionality, though it is not always immediately clear whether these geometric structures recede or project into space. In Chunka Hukniyuq Pacha (2022) these frames resemble tombs or containers that store and protect objects, while in Chunka Kimsayuq Pacha (2022) they liken podiums and altars that elevate items onto a raised platform. In any case, these framing devices adopt traditional procedures of presenting artifacts in display cases or raised mounts, but Martínez Garay offers a modern update by designing the frames in a bold, graphic and geometric style. They register as monumental forms to figure space and depth, so that ultimately the items inexplicably hover in the picture as if coming from and belonging nowhere. This constitutes a loose form of French anthropologist and ethnologist Marc Augé’s ‘Non-Places concept’ which refers to those spaces and objects that have been stripped of the symbolic expressions of their identity and exist as “something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner.”⁴ Martínez’s appropriated images of history settle into an unequivocally haunting and perturbing half-presence: visually present but their meanings not wholly or immediately accessible.
Cultural objects and symbols are simultaneously containers of stories known and lost, markers of evolving cultural aesthetics and values, and representative of the idiosyncrasies of identity under multiple supplanting forces of empire and power. Martínez Garay writes, “pre-existing images are a fundamental trigger in my work; it is a way of reviewing and questioning the past, trying to understand it for what it has bequeathed us, and speculating about the unknown or that which is absent.”⁵ The artist’s attitude carries through in how she images material, ecological, and vernacular culture at times in ruins or lost, while in others vital and monumental. These visual narratives are encoded with the contradictions of an incomplete memory reassembled, reimaged, and reclaimed through creative means.
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Footnotes
¹ Melissa Joseph and Claudia Martínez Garay, “Tone shifting: Claudia Martínez Garay interviewed,” BOMB Magazine, October 11, 2022, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/tone-shifting-or-how-the-solution-to-tokenism-is-accompaniment-claudia-mart%C3%ADnez-garay-interviewed/
² An essay by Jorge Luis Borges, originally published in Otras Inquisiciones.
³ GRIMM Gallery, press release for Ghost Kingdom, October 2022.
⁴ M. Augé Non-Lieux, Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris, Le Seuil, 1992. Translated as Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, John Howe, trans. (New York: Verso, 1995).
⁵ “Claudia Martínez Garay: A las revoluciones, Como a los árboles, Se Les Reconoce por sus Frutos,” Artishock Revista, August 4, 2020, https://artishockrevista.com/2020/08/04/claudia-martinez-garay-grimm-gallery/
Clara Maria Apostolatos is an M.A. student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art of Latin America, Institutional Critique, and the politics of memory. She co-curated the exhibition “Kenneth Kemble and Silvia Torras: The Formative Years, 1956-63” and held positions at the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Center for Italian Modern Art, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.