Claudia Martínez Garay: Ayataki
Claudia Martínez Garay, Ayataki, 2022-23
HD video animation, colour, sound, 14 min 40 sec. Courtesy the artist and Grimm, Amsterdam/London/New York
About the work
Ayataki (2022), an animated video and surround sound installation by the artist, was commissioned and produced by Artpace San Antonio and the Denver Art Museum, and debuted in ‘Who Tells a Tale Adds a Tail: Latin America and Contemporary Art’ (2023) at the Denver Art Museum. Through visuals and an original collaged score, reinterpreted with a synthesizer by the artist, Peruvian Andean folkloric music is intertwined with Quechua church melodies, radio transmissions, Spanish dialogues, sorrowful voices, pan flutes, raging guitars and radio commercial propaganda to relay a tale of forced displacement due to violence and war.
The radio tower, bomb cars and burned rural houses – often targeted by the terrorist group Shining Path during the internal war in Peru – have become symbols of terror, loss, and despair of that time. This work, as a whole, is a lamentation on the Andean landscape. Social issues and historical events are presented in a non-linear narrative, and the mixed poetic and formal composition of sound constructs a solemn funeral cadence, sonically reflecting a mourning for those who did not survive the war.
About the artist
Claudia Martínez Garay (b. 1983, Ayacucho, Peru) is a Peruvian artist who lives and works between Amsterdam, Netherlands and Lima, Peru. Her practice encompasses painting, sculpture, printmaking, video and site-specific installation. Martínez Garay takes inspiration from her Andean heritage, exploring historical images, propaganda and sounds from her home country.
She is interested in how artefacts, cultural relics and propaganda communicate the history and sociopolitical memory of cultures. Her work challenges the persistence of colonialist frameworks and official narratives that inform our understanding of pre-Columbian cultures. Martínez Garay reanimates the existing fragments of lost histories, underscoring the connections between that which can be salvaged and continued.
About ICA x FRIEZE FILM LONDON
Frieze Film returns to Frieze London in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The curated selection of seven films will be screened throughout Frieze Week, 8–13 October, at the ICA and on frieze.com, streaming online until 31 October.
The programme showcases films from galleries with a focus on early-career and under-exposed artists. This year’s films were selected by a jury including Steven Cairns (Curator of Artists' Film and Moving Image at the ICA), Myriam Mouflih (Curator, Writer and Programmer at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival) and Guilherme Blanc (Artistic Director of Batalha Centro de Cinema and curator of independent cinema and moving image) for the second year.
