Darkness Visible

Darkness Visible: The Long Shadow of Dictatorship is an exhibition developed by the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires at and with Spazio Punch on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the coup d’état that ushered in Argentina’s last military dictatorship, a regime that implemented a systematic policy of censorship, torture, murder and forced disappearance. With nineteen artists and collectives from a wide range of generations and works spanning the 1970s to the present, the exhibition claims the museum space as a civic platform, affirms the role of artists in society and positions art as a vehicle for the understanding of history, the protection of memory and of human rights, the engagement of activism against State terror and as a means to raise civic awareness in the face of violence. The exhibition includes works by major contemporary artists who responded to this historic moment with alarm, condemnation or criticism; artists who embodied the transition from dictatorship to democracy and who continue to denounce the violence prevailing in contemporary societies and the increasingly physical and psychological violence against women – most notably in the form of femicide. The words ‘Darkness Visible’ are taken from the description of Hell in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). The oxymoron serves as an apt metaphor for the role of the visual arts in bringing to light what has been hidden or censored and yet remains unbearable: the continued presence of the disappeared as a symbol of Argentina’s last dictatorship.