Tools for Utopia

Marta Dziewanska, Ferreira Gullar, Waldemar Cordeiro, James Koch, Gyula Kosice

Tools for Utopia: Selected works from the Daros Latinamerica Collection is an exhibition of works from the 1950s to the late 1970s by artists from Brazil, Venezuela, Uruguay, and Argentina: Gego, Hélio Oiticica, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Jesús Rafael Soto, Mira Schendel, Liliana Porter, Julio Le Parc, and Ana Mendieta. Created when many Latin American coun-tries were in conflict and ruled by dictators, these works? Concrete, Neo-Concrete, Conceptual?were means of transgression. They were not only created as reactions but as artistic counter-proposals to totalitarian systems: signs of genuine engagement and experiments that included in-gredients of social and political utopia. The exhibition and the accompanying publication are conceived as ?tools,? re-ferring to the efforts of the artists to transcend representa-tion and become active agents for societal transformation. By displaying...