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