The Arts of Resistance  exhibit at the Museum of Anthropology was curated by Laura Osorio Sunnucks and, in a nutshell, designed to show “the political and social significance of (Latin American) artistic traditions”. As someone who has been fortunate to have worked in social justice and international development environments for almost six years now, the way that art can be used to express politics, particularly the politics of historically and currently marginalized groups, is of particular interest to me. I am Malala, by Malala Yousafzai was a book that changed the way I thought about the world by sharing an experience of girl’s education in Pakistan that I had never before considered. Heading to the museum, I was excited to see how these pieces of art would affect me and to learn about communities I hadn’t been aware of before.

I will admit before I went to the exhibit I had never even heard of the Indigenous people of Ayacucho, let alone had any awareness of the terrible struggle they went through in the 1980s simply for happening to live a region experiencing the very real consequences of a global ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism. It is this specific case of politics, trauma and the art that was created out of it that I have chosen to focus this blog on as it particularly caught my attention amongst the many pieces on display at the exhibition. To give a little more context to this piece, the Indigenous people of Ayacucho have lived in this specific region of southern Peru for thousands of years and through many different empires including the Incan and Spanish. Therefore, though a traditionally farming-based community, this is a society that had experienced its fair share of conflict and upheaval over the course of its history. However, the 1980s brought a scale of suffering to the region not seen since the Peruvian War of Independence in the early 19th century. It also disproportionately affected Indigenous people with 75% of the over 69,000 killed during the conflict speaking an indigenous language such Quechua, despite these groups making up only about 15% of the total Peruvian population. Taking personal memories of this scale of trauma and translating them into artwork is a highly thought-provoking process and one that fascinated me as I further considered the piece.

I think there were two reasons in particular why this specific artwork stood out. The first is the sheer scale of the trauma displayed by the work, and the contrast between that and the traditional, delicate way it has been painted onto the rectangular wooden boards. There’s a pair of very notable boards towards the end of the series that are covered in illustrations of kidnapping, murder and death with women and men tied up, bleeding from bullet wounds and even on fire at the hands of both the Shining Path guerrilla movement and the US-backed Peruvian Government army. Yet, the art form itself reminds me more of the Tintin comics I read as a child than the way I’ve been brought up to understood art created from trauma. It’s a world away from the World War One poetry I studied in high school for instance.  However, the art form does make more sense given its context in the local society. These drawings would have traditionally decorated the insides of people’s houses and so had to balance the importance of retelling the culture’s rich history, tragedy included, with, quite practically, ensuring the children of the house could still get to sleep at night. Nevertheless, I think that it is this contradiction of shocking imagery with an art form that has been so traditionally innocent to me that made the piece so striking and interesting to take in. 

The other reason why it stood out was the name of the piece, Piraq Causa, meaning “Who is to blame?” in the native Quechuan language. Interestingly, the artwork itself does little to attempt to answer this question, painting both the guerrilla movement and the government troops, by the end of the piece at least, in equally bad light and therefore suggesting that there is not one clear answer. Moreover, the description alongside the art explicitly acknowledges that the initial positive reception of the guerrillas by the locals is omitted in the artwork, replaced by an image that shows more skepticism of their arrival. This recognition of the cultural bias in the piece further muddies the water as to actual state of events and raises a multitude of interesting questions concerning the right of communities to control, and to a certain extent alter, their own histories and memories. But that is a whole nuanced conversation in and of itself and something to examine in another blog. What I want to focus on here is this examination of blame as one of the most meaningful points of the artwork. To me this artwork was making a strong case that by fixating over the question of who is to blame in a situation, as especially the mass media tend to do, we forget, or more cynically we actively avoid, devoting any attention to the actual victims of the tragedy. In this case it was the Ayacucho people but this idea rings true of almost all conflicts and is particularly apparent in our approach to the current war in Syria, where geopolitics takes centre stage over the suffering of the local people. There is no doubt that the attribution of the blame, and the hope for justice that comes with it, is important, but at what cost? When our obsession for finding the worst villain in a series of devastating events averts our attention from aiding the victims of the events then I believe that we, as humans, have got our priorities completely the wrong way around. I think part of the reason for the provocative name of this artwork is insinuating that very idea and it stuck out particularly in my mind. 

Ultimately, the more you consider all pieces of political art, the more questions are raised about the way society currently operates. The answers are rarely obvious and in certain cases there may never be a clear-cut answer to a situation which, for someone like me who is constantly wanting to make things better, is incredibly frustrating. But, just as I am Malala did, this exhibit brought my attention to something I had not considered before and at the end of the day, to me, that is always something valuable and worthwhile.  

You can find out more about the museum exhibit here and more about the Peruvian conflict from the UK-based Peru Support Group here.