Sights and Sounds: Peru
Sights and Sounds: Peru features new work by Eliana Otta, Rita Ponce de León, José Luis Martinat, and Cristian Alarcón Ismodes, selected by Miguel A. López.
In Peru, motion pictures and video have been a powerful device for political critique since the mid-1990s. This is especially meaningful in a country whose recent memory has been shaped by a hijacked mass media and a culture of surveillance. Yet it was the broadcast of footage of government authorities bribing politicians, officials, and TV station chiefs that led to the fall of the last dictatorship in Peru in 2000. The great impact of all this is reflected in an emerging art scene that uses commercial media to comment critically on pressing issues: globalization; migration and diaspora; social activism; history; modernization; the confrontation of Andean and Western culture; and public space.
Unsurprisingly, there is a vein of work dealing with a political past that refuses to be left behind. Cristian Alarcón Ismodes and José Luis Martinat both endured armed conflict and dictatorship in their youth and now explore the memory of their experiences with black humor and irony. Eliana Otta focuses on the longstanding social problems that result from colonialism, inequality, and marginalization. Rita Ponce de León, preoccupied by language, imagines the body as a tool of expression and explores its participation in the public sphere.
Miguel A. López
Curator
Miguel A. López (b. Lima, 1983) is a writer, artist, and researcher. He has published in Afterall, ramona, e-flux Journal, Manifesta Journal, and Art in America, among other journals. As a member of Red Conceptualismos del Sur, López co-curated Losing the Human Form: A Seismic Image of the 1980s in Latin America at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2012–13). He also co-curated Altered Pulse at the MUAC—Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM, Mexico City (2013–14).
About Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video
This long-term series offers a rotating selection of vigorous film and video works by contemporary artists from around the world — with a particular emphasis on work being made outside western Europe and the United States.
Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video is a long-term presentation of new film and video works made in the sphere of the visual arts. The series offers a rotating selection of vigorous works by contemporary artists from around the world. It introduces New York audiences to the latest developments in filmmaking within the art context and underlines the Jewish Museum’s holistic and global approach to the understanding and presentation of art and culture.
Sights and Sounds takes advantage of the straightforward way film and video travel: shipped on discs or streamed online, these works provide an instant connection to new creative practices from even the most remote locations.
Twenty-five international curators have selected new film and video work from their respective regions of the world—ranging from Argentina to Vietnam, Nigeria to Romania, New Zealand to China, and many places in between. Their picks are screened for one month each in the museum’s media center, which has been turned into a miniature cinema for the occasion.
The works in Sights and Sounds touch on themes significant to both Jewish culture and universal human experience: spirituality, exile, language, conflict, family, humor, history. The series creates a broad network of artistic expression and curatorial perspectives that takes stock of what is happening in film and video art at this moment in time across the globe—with a particular emphasis on work being made outside western Europe and the United States.
Sights and Sounds will culminate with a selection of highlights from the series. One work from each country will be presented in the gallery from February 5, 2016 to June 30, 2016.
Jens Hoffmann
Deputy Director
Exhibitions and Public Programs

Installation view of Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video in the Goodkind Media Center. Photo by David Heald.