Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces Review

One might assume that Columbia’s Wallach Art Gallery would extend the university’s ongoing suppression of student led activism protesting ICE raids and the genocide in Gaza. However, Lotty Rosenfeld’s retrospective, Disobedient Spaces, presents an uncensored point of view: political activism and collective art action are powerful tools to combat authoritarian systems of oppression. 

Born in 1943, Rosenfeld grew up in Santiago and lived through the U.S. backed 1973 coup and the rise of dictator Augusto Pinochet. The exhibition highlights the evolution of her work from early etchings to her videography and public art action. It opens with an eye-catching red wall with oversized prints taken from video footage of her pivotal work “Una Milla de Cruces Sobre el Pavimento” in which she laid white tape and bandages across traffic lines to create, as the title suggests, crosses on the pavement. Rosenfeld continued to speak out against Pinochet’s dictatorship with the art collective CADA, whose “NO+” campaign invited the public to finish the sentence “No More…” in their own words. 

Seen today, Rosenfeld’s interventions feel simple yet radical. A strip of tape laid on the pavement is a visual interruption of authority. Disobedient Spaces reminds visitors that small acts of resistance, particularly those carried out in the street during times of heightened military presence, can build visibility, solidarity and community under systems of oppression. 

- Nicole Bunis

Review of "Papunya Tula: Meeting Place for all Brothers and Cousins" at Foreign & Domestic (Group A)

    Papunya Tula: Meeting Place for all Brothers and Cousins features a group of Aboriginal artists from the Western Desert of Australia. The approach of the series is to repeat abstract patterns, using organic lines and geometric shapes to depict the beauty of nature in their ancestral homeland. The color palettes are mostly red, black, and earth tones, representing the red sand desert. Although the Papunya Tula movement is a contemporary art movement that incorporates techniques from other styles, its subject matter, colors, and patterns clearly drew inspiration from the ancient rock and cave paintings in Australia. 

    The design of the exhibition provides an opportunity for each artist to express their style. Sally Nakamarra paints colorful grids representing the rockholes and soakage water of Watunuma. Yalti Napangati paints short red strokes on black canvas, representing the sandhills and the rocky hills. Aubrey Tjangala paints black on black, depicting body paint designs associated with the Dreamtime water. Adrian Jurra Tjungurrayi paints organic dotted lines representing the bush carrot plants. Angus Tjungurrayi paints monochromatic lines of the salt lake site of Wilkinkarra.

    This is my favorite exhibition because it honors the effort in preserving their ancestral Dreamtime culture before colonization, especially when their culture is not well-known in the world. The downside of combining contemporary art with regional culture is that it becomes hard for audiences to understand the meaning behind the series. But overall, I appreciate having the opportunity to learn more about marginalized cultures from different parts of the world.

Review of "Disobedient Spaces" at the Wallach Gallery, Ksenija Carleton (Group A)

      

    “Disobedient Spaces” – showing at Columbia’s Wallach Gallery till March 15^th, constitutes the first US retrospective of the Chilean artist, Lotty Rosenfeld. Remembered as one of the most influential feminist artists from Latin America, Rosenfeld’s practice began in the early 1960’s, and matured into primarily video and performance based work following Augusto Pinochet’s coup in 1973. Censorship, state violence, and female oppression were central themes in Rosenfeld’s work, which was in direct conversation with the brutality of the Pinochet dictatorship. Indeed, Rosenfeld explored artistic intervention as a means for political resistance.

The retrospective is organized into eight sections that follow a loosely chronological and largely thematic structure. The Wallach explores Rosenfeld via her early works on paper; videos; screen-prints; significant interventions like A thousand crosses on the pavement (1979-80), Una Herida Americana (1982), No+ (as a member of the group CADA); and her decades long collaboration with Palestinian-Chilean artist Diamela Eltit. The sections tend to bleed into each other at the Wallach, where the circulation also feels unspecified. This frames Rosenfeld’s artistic production as a politically and thematically unified body of work, which consistently committed itself to social justice, equality, and liberation of the oppressed.

In the wake of Columbia’s fierce repression of student protests in 2024, and compliance with Trump’s efforts to overhaul academic freedom, the Wallach’s exhibit, by illustrating how the militant potentials of artistic intervention were effectively harnessed by Rosenfeld, serves as an act of resistance in itself – a rebuttal to the institution it is housed by.

                                                                                                                            Ksenija Carleton