Tlatelolco: Stillstellung - Fernando Sánchez Castillo

Spanish artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo (Spain, 1970) focuses on the tragic events in Tlatelolco, Mexico City on 2 October 1968, when police and other armed forces massacred up to 300 students and other antigovernment protesters. The works in the show are based on the artist’s investigation into all forms of resource material relating to the massacre—documents, photographs, videos, and archives—and on the artistic re-representation and reenactment of some of these to elaborate on their meanings. His work is an attempt to rewrite History's accounts or at least to make us more aware of its complexities and traces, and to show that History is constructed from a position of power.

Sánchez Castillo is one of the most important Spanish artists working today, and has exhibited at numerous international museums and cultural institutions. He is producing exceptional work regarding the issues behind monumentality. While other artists also address the phenomenon, they have tended to approach it as a subject or a theme by criticizing its content, ironizing its form and esthetic, or even by directly intervening real monuments. Instead Sánchez Castillo develops, often with humor, a radical critique of the monumental discourse in which he disarticulates its agencies of power and representation.

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