FRANCISCA ANINAT

(Santiago, 1979)

In 1999, during her second year at art school, Aninat makes a painting of an architectural space on a single canvas, which she then tears apart and sows back together. From that moment on, the artist constructs a metaphor that embodies part of the political history of the last sixty years in South America. According to curator Alexia Tala, N. 5, South-American Series (2015) represents “a restorative action for a continent under constant dictatorships, social fractures, and revolts that left their marks.” Developed collectively with patients in hospital waiting rooms, the work also activates Joseph Beuys’s principle of “social sculpture,” in which art takes on a public role and “everyone is an artist.”