Rosemberg Sandoval Shows Acts of Political Violence

‘Rosemberg Sandoval: Performer’ at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (MAMBO) – the Colombian artist’s first institutional retrospective – opens with a room whose beauty belies the exhibition’s underlying brutality. Large-scale abstract frottage drawings in red iron oxide titled Red Ranch (2022) flank a suspended frottage of a monolithic stone figure titled Tablón Woman II (in Black) (2011–22). Broken Maps ­– Amazon (2014), a map of Latin America executed on white paper, for instance, is in fact formed from a multitude of stab marks, while the vestiges of a 2023 re-enactment of the artist’s performance Rose -Rose (2001) hint at the violence of an action during which, seated on a pre-Columbian ritual rock, Sandoval tears apart a bouquet of red roses as blood drips from his thorn-pricked hands.

These minimalist traces of an obsessive mania take measure of the histories of Sandoval’s homeland – a ruthlessness further explored in works such as Symptom (1984), which saw the artist use the tongue from the corpse of a political prisoner dipped in human blood to repeatedly write words of debasement across a gallery wall; the performance ended only when the tongue was entirely worn away. Elsewhere, Dirt (1999) features a low-hewn white plinth lightly smeared with grime from the living body of a homeless person, who Sandoval used as both brush and pigment. The precedent for both these works is an unrealized project from 1980, represented in the exhibition via a drawing, which proposes dragging the corpse of a political prisoner across Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolivar – the centre of governmental authority – until the victim’s body is fully ground into the asphalt.

The show’s curators, Eugenio Viola and Juaniko Moreno, endeavour to make sense of such violence by situating Sandoval alongside movements such as actionism and Colombian nadaism as well as artists like Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys and Gina Pane. The installation similarly counteracts Sandoval’s use of grotesque materials – anonymous body parts stolen from morgues, street detritus – by foregrounding, instead, moments of incidental beauty. Shards of glass collected from a terrorist attack, for instance, are presented like flowers in a white vase (By the Way of Emergency, 1985). Art-historical context and aesthetics seem here almost an apologia for the horror the work contains. Unlike actionism, Sandoval’s art is not a response to a sterile or censured culture; rather, his work is enmeshed in the abjection of a specific socio-cultural context.

This hesitancy to engage with the affective charge and social indictment of Sandoval’s practice is most evident in the exhibition’s handling of works that explore certain experiences of Colombian childhood. In Popular Major (1991), for instance, five metallic rods pierce children’s shoes that the artist found on the street, in reference to the government’s ‘social cleansing campaigns’ of the era. The disconnect between a wall label that reads ‘found leather, rubber and cotton’ alongside this assortment of heavily worn children’s shoes (pink Barbie sandals, ‘bubble summer’ tennis shoes, white satin baptism slippers) is jarring. What does it say about our society that children not only have to live on city streets, but are even then ‘cleansed’ from them? Sandoval’s profoundly moralistic work implicates us all in this failure: he finds in conceptual and performative gesture a mechanism of communication where discourse fails.

In presenting a retrospective of Sandoval, an artist who resists institutional culture by highlighting the profound inequities from which it derives, MAMBO continues to demonstrate its commitment to radical practices that engage with socio-political realities. Nonetheless, I left wishing that the curation had met the unceasing courage of the artist himself, whose visceral response to the impact of such government-endorsed cruelty has so far exceeded all other attempts to grapple with Colombian realities.

‘Rosemberg Sandoval: Performer’ is on view at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá until 1 October.

_{Main Image: ‘Rosemberg Sandoval: Performer’, 2023, exhibition view. Courtesy: Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá; photograph: Gregorio Díaz}