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“El orden de los factores” by Sandra Gamarra at Museo Amparo
25.06.2022-17.10.2022
Through painting, Sandra Gamarra Heshiki (Lima, Peru, 1972) questions the mechanisms of representation of the art system and the museum as an ideological device. She resorts to copying to make available certain cultural artifacts that have been extracted from their contexts within the framework of the modern-colonial regime. The artist adopts a syncretic gaze where pre-Columbian, viceroyalty, modern and contemporary material productions enter into friction.
In El orden de los factores, Gamarra Heshiki focuses on the genre of caste painting, popular during the 18th century in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The pictorial series of 16 and 20 paintings illustrate racial classifications based on family reproduction. Guided by “purity of blood”, they teach a hierarchical social organization with the objective of placing and perpetuating Spaniards and Creoles in power. Although the production of the series was concentrated in Mexico City and Puebla, only one example is known to have been produced outside the current Mexican territory, in the Viceroyalty of Peru. This is the starting point from which Gamarra Heshiki establishes connections between the identity constructions of Peru and Mexico, in connection with his own biography. From there, she points to the violence that emerges from the intersections between race, class and gender in the colonial order.
The Western classifying gaze systematized during the 18th century reaffirms hierarchies and justifies social, racial and gender differences as “natural” categories. It is also this gaze that constructs an otherness -distinct from the Western subject- through its exoticization. From this perspective, women and other racialized people are seen as “inferior”, “primitive” or “backward” and, like nature, are assumed as resources to be exploited. Revisiting the order that gives rise to this violence allows us to detect its persistence in the present and to imagine the possibilities of altering it.
Pamela Desjardins | Curator
Source: https://museoamparo.com/exposiciones/piezas/257/el-orden-de-los-factores-sandra-gamarra-heshiki
In El orden de los factores, Gamarra Heshiki focuses on the genre of caste painting, popular during the 18th century in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The pictorial series of 16 and 20 paintings illustrate racial classifications based on family reproduction. Guided by “purity of blood”, they teach a hierarchical social organization with the objective of placing and perpetuating Spaniards and Creoles in power. Although the production of the series was concentrated in Mexico City and Puebla, only one example is known to have been produced outside the current Mexican territory, in the Viceroyalty of Peru. This is the starting point from which Gamarra Heshiki establishes connections between the identity constructions of Peru and Mexico, in connection with his own biography. From there, she points to the violence that emerges from the intersections between race, class and gender in the colonial order.
The Western classifying gaze systematized during the 18th century reaffirms hierarchies and justifies social, racial and gender differences as “natural” categories. It is also this gaze that constructs an otherness -distinct from the Western subject- through its exoticization. From this perspective, women and other racialized people are seen as “inferior”, “primitive” or “backward” and, like nature, are assumed as resources to be exploited. Revisiting the order that gives rise to this violence allows us to detect its persistence in the present and to imagine the possibilities of altering it.
Pamela Desjardins | Curator
Source: https://museoamparo.com/exposiciones/piezas/257/el-orden-de-los-factores-sandra-gamarra-heshiki