Liberating Light
Experience a selection of three, newly acquired videos in the museum's collection. Taking into account our inter-generational, interdisciplinary, Caribbean, and ancestral ties.
Liberar la luz: nuevas adquisiciones de video (Liberating Light: New Video Acquisitions) presents a selection of three videos that have recently entered the collection of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC), made by the artists La Vaughn Belle (b. Tobago 1974. Lives in Christiansted, Santa Cruz, USVI), Michael D. Linares (b. Bayamón, Puerto Rico 1979), and Daniel Lind Ramos (b. Loíza, Puerto Rico 1953).
The exhibition is guided by the desire to expand the MAC collection so that it reflects the importance of the audiovisual in contemporary production and video as a means of exploring the themes that run through the vast body of work produced by these artists.
Liberating Light, Exhibition View (2023-05-17)Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico
Notably, two of the videos featured –Belle's Por el viento y la corriente (Becoming Wind and Current), and Lind Ramos' Talegas de la memoria (Memory’s Cargo)– were developed in Loíza as part of MAC en el Barrio, the museum’s program for cultural equity and artistic commissions.
Liberating Light, Exhibition View (2023-05-17)Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico
In Talegas de la memoria, Lind Ramos presents an allegory of the history and colonization of Puerto Rico starring the cultural expressions of Loíza.
Filmed on Vacía Talega beach, the video musically dramatizes the historical transformations that have taken place in Puerto Rico, performed by characters linked to the popular performers of the Santiago Apóstol Festival. As is customary, the artist makes use of the festivities as a prism through which to interpret the world.
Liberating Light, Exhibition View (2023-05-17)Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico
The video is accompanied in the galleries by two sculptural assemblages that honor the work of the cooks of Loíza.
Liberating Light, Exhibition View (2023-05-17)Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico
Por el viento y la corriente investigates the history of marronage of enslaved people who fled from the island of Saint Croix to Puerto Rico in search of their freedom
As part of the commission, Belle created the floating coconut installation seen in the video, which is inspired by the descriptions of the tribal marks borne by the enslaved included in advertisements seeking their return as property.
Liberating Light, Exhibition View (2023-05-17)Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico
These marks, scars that reflect a pre-slavery identity and cultural heritage, are a reminder of the indestructible spirit of those who carried them. The work is a poetic essay on the history of marronage and its implications today.
Liberating Light, Exhibition View (2023-05-17)Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico
Both works dialogue with Una historia aleatoria del palo (An Aleatory History of the Stick), a piece in which Linares investigates the stick as the origin of metaphor in the history of humanitye, establishing poetic connections in relation to the history of civilizations.
Liberating Light, Exhibition View (2023-05-17)Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico
Nurtured by visual references that emanate from his studies and interest in art, anthropology and archaeology, the visual style of the video evokes Internet searches and how influences and knowledge coexist in the digital realm.
With this exhibition, the MAC reaffirms its commitment to the practice of collecting the art of our times, giving an account of the intergenerational, interdisciplinary, Caribbean, and ancestral ties that bind us.
