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[20240703]
WAKCHAKUNA by CLAUDIA MARTÍNEZ GARAY at NOTTINGHAM CONTEMPORARY [from 20240525 to 20240808]
[Photos: Lewis Ronald]
“Imagine how the ancient Peruvians would feel seeing our world today. Modernity has shamelessly disregarded their traditions and beliefs. Offerings and artifacts were stolen and stashed away in Europe, lost and robbed of their purpose. But just as the ancient cultures couldn't foresee our present, Europe can't conceive a future deprived of these artifacts." – Claudia Martínez Garay
For her solo exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, Claudia Martínez Garay (b. 1983, Peru) presents Wakchakuna, a new large-scale installation that addresses current debates around how historic and ethnographic objects from South America are obtained, categorised and displayed in European museums and collections.
Wakchakuna takes the shape of a mountain referencing an excavated grave where sacrificed and funerary objects can be seen partially unearthed amongst the soil, sand and rubble. Drawings of native creatures including a cojinova fish, a spondylus shell, an otter, and a wild jaguarundi cat - whose bones were found as offerings in these burials – are printed on aluminium plates. These beings haunt and stalk the mountain, nestled amongst handmade portrait vessels and objects that would have been buried with the deceased as sacrifices and offerings for the afterlife. Referred to by Martínez Garay as ‘wakchas’ - meaning ‘to be poor’ in Quechua, an indigenous South American language - these objects are now orphaned, removed from their original home, funerary context and intended purpose, suspended between life and death.
Martínez Garay draws attention to the spiritual lives and symbolic meanings pre-modern objects hold for indigenous people, and how these immaterial values are traded for financial gain by Western cultures, collectors, and museums. Wakchakuna is a gesture towards returning looted objects back to their original sacred context to lie under the protection of native creatures and ancient kin once again.
[Text: Nottingham Contemporary]
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