[EVENT] Paraguayan artists present new artworks at online open studios

At three online open studios over the next few weeks, a group of Paraguayan artists will present new works created as a result of a project with the British Museum where they interacted with more than 600 objects from the Paraguayan Chaco that have never been exhibited.

‘Collection, Mission, Colonisation: Encounters and Entangled Histories from the Chaco‘ is a collaborative project carried out with SDCELAR. It is inspired by a collection that comes mainly from the Enxet people in the south of the Paraguayan Chaco, acquired by Anglican missionaries, Wilfrid Barbrooke Grubb and Seymour Hawtrey at the end of the 19th century.

Artists, researchers and curators from the Paraguayan Chaco came together with the aim of unravelling and clarifying the impact of the mission and colonisation processes in the Gran Chaco, and showing contemporary local Enlhet, Nivacle, Guarani and Mennonite responses to these impacts.

In these three open online studios, artists will present their works and reveal the foundations of their creative response to this British Museum’s collection in prints, photographs, digital illustrations, and drawings.

In her series of prints, Miriam Rudolph explores the complexities of colonisation in the Chaco region: “I spent several months reading first-hand accounts by the missionaries, journal publications, and academic papers, publications by Mennonite settlers and scholars, as well as accounts by indigenous elders of their displacement process, in order to gather information that later informed my images and became part of the content in the form of text excerpts.”

The artists in the Indigenous collective ‘Living Arts’ – Osvaldo Pitoe, Jorge Carema, Efacio Álvarez, Marcos Ortiz, Esteban Klassen and Clemente Juliuz (1972-2021)- in collaboration with anthropologists Ursula and Verena Regehr, created a series of drawings inspired by the objects from the collection. In their drawings, they recall historical ways of living in the Chaco, and show the contemporary life of the Nivacle and Guarani Peoples.

For Enlhet artist, Lanto’oy ‘Unruh, his digital illustrations and photographs seek to show the reality of his community: “It is important for me to give visibility to the People I belong to because we are also here, my Indigenous People. In the context of a complex correlation between seeing and saying, between perception and expression, I explore forms of expression and the creation of meanings”.

You can read more about the artists and the project at this link.

Open studios

The online free open studios will be hosted by the British Museum on Zoom. They will have simultaneous interpretation (Spanish and English). Subscribe to each of the events by entering the links below.  

Miriam Rudolph- Thursday, March 24 – 6 pm London (GMT)

Register here. 

Indigenous collective ‘Living Arts’ – Thursday, March 31 – 6 pm London (GMT+1) 

Register here.

Lanto’oy’ Unruh – Wednesday, April 6 – 6 pm London (GMT+1)

Register here.

About the artists