Abstract

LEON MANTILLA, Christian. Medusa’s gaze. Art, gender and power in 90’s Ecuador. La ventana [online]. 2019, vol.6, n.50, pp.306-330. ISSN 1405-9436.

During the 90s of the twentieth century there was an abrupt change in the field of art in Ecuador that allowed an incorporation of women in all spheres of production, circulation, legitimization and enhancement of art. In the context of the transit of modernism and contemporaneity, this moment is characterized by the emergence of new subjectivities and languages in the emergent context of the contemporary art scene. On the one hand, the artist emerges as a plural and sexed subject, which is evident in the presence of new places of enunciation constructed by women and sexual minorities that challenge the patriarchal culture that had prevailed in modernist painting and sculpture. On the other hand, there is a pluralization of languages from the introduction of installation, assemblage, performance, photography, video and urban intervention that nourish the strategies of contemporary art to work on sexual difference. The text raises the need to revisit the sex-generic perspectives and feminist theories to re-read the feminine artistic practices that from other paradigms end up invisible. That is why he resorts to figures such as "Medusa" (Cixous) or notions such as "matrix gaze" (Pollock) or "misterismo" (Irigaray) that have the ability to reopen the field of meaning of sexual difference in the contemporary art and reveal the power of questioning that women's art has to date. Based on these approaches, he recognizes the questioning power of contemporary practices carried out by women artists to question the patriarchal values present in modern painting and Ecuadorian society.

Keywords : art; contemporaneity; gender; feminism; Ecuador.

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