The word "disappeared" was redefined during the mid-20th century in Latin America. "Disappear" evolved into a noun used to identify people who were kidnapped, tortured and killed by their own governments in the latter decades of the twentieth century in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela (during a single uprising). Colombia with its fifty-year civil war and Guatemala with its own thirty-seven-year civil war further expanded the meanings and uses of "disappear."

The exhibition contains work by contemporary artists from each of these countries, over the course of the last thirty years, have made art about the disappeared. These artists have lived through the horrors of the military dictatorships that rocked their countries in the mid-decades of the twentieth century. Some worked in the resistance; some had parents or siblings who were disappeared; others were forced into exile. The youngest were born into the aftermath of those dictatorships. And still others have lived in countries maimed by endless civil war.

In the mid-1990s, Laurel Reuter, Director of the North Dakota Museum of Art and curator of this exhibition, began to find significant and moving art made by artists personally touched by the horrors of civil war in Latin America. Not all of the art was newly made. Luis Camnitzer fled Montevideo, Uruguay, in the early 1980s and shortly after completed the thirty-five etchings that comprise The Torture Series in the exhibition.

Juan Manuel Echavarría began making work about the violence in his own country-Colombia-eight years ago when he gave up his life as a novelist to become a photographer. His newest work, N N (no name) is seen for the first time in this exhibition. In it he unearths the metaphorical decay and destruction that inevitably accompanies violence against both the individual and the larger collective society. As frequently happens, the destruction is overlaid with a terrible beauty.

Echavarría's work echoes a theme that reverberates throughout the exhibition: the erasure of the personal, of the individual, of the self. Row upon row of vanishing faces mark the work of Colombian Oscar Muñoz, Venezuelan Sara Maneiro, and Uruguayan Ana Tiscornia. Nicolas Guagnini , an Argentinean, shatters the face of one man in his large-scale installation in the Museum Garden. His father, a political journalist, was disappeared when the artist was ten years old. In Guagnini's art his father's face forms in the viewer's eye, exists for a moment, and then dissolves as the viewer walks past the installation-only to be confronted with an uncanny facsimile of the same face in the artist/son.

Like Guagnini, Marcelo Brodsky is interested in the specific faces of those he knew. He returned to Argentina from years of exile in Spain and began to search for friends from his past. This resulted in Good Memory, a photo installation that documented the twenty-five year reunion of Brodsky's high school class. His second work in the exhibition is about his disappeared brother. He also continues to work on the establishment of the Park of Memory along the banks of the Rio de la Plata in Buenos Aires. The Plata River became the final resting place for legions of disappeared from both Argentina and Uruguay whose bodies were dropped from small aircraft into the river, disappeared forever.

In the world of American television, forensic evidence is the new god. A person is known by their dental work. The killer is caught. The killer is punished. In much of the rest of the world, however, a set of dental records is a luxury reserved for those with access to power. Until very recently, mass graves could not be sorted out. Instead, as in the work of Sara Maneiro, teeth sink back into the landscape, which, in her photographs, are lush, gorgeous places of beauty. We come from the earth and we return to the earth, unknown and unknowable.

Some of these artists make monuments to those who were killed and to their killers. Ivan Navarro made a thirty-foot, spectacular ladder to the sky and on the lighted rungs he listed the names of six-hundred Chileans recently indicted for killing their own people. Fernando Traverso paints 350 bicycles all over his home city of Rosario, Argentina, one for each person disappeared. He photographs the graffiti bicycles and mounts them in the exhibitions as scenic "postcards." He made a second work, a wall of silk "tombstones" emblazoned with the ghost image of a bicycle, one for each of his fellow resistance workers disappeared during those dark years of dictatorship. Why the bicycle? Because if someone went missing their abandoned bicycle served as early evidence of their fate.

On exhibit for the first time in the United States is a large installation, Identidad (Identity), made by thirteen Argentinean artists in order to assist the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, in their work. The Grandmothers are a group of Argentinean women with disappeared children and grandchildren. Since its founding in 1977, the Grandmothers have searched for over 200 missing children, some born in clandestine detention centers during the captivity of their mothers or abducted with their parents after being taken into custody by members of the police or security forces. Upon seeing Identidad when it opened in the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires, three people discovered "who they were" before they had been adopted by military families.

A metaphor for the whole exhibition exists in the work of Oscar Muñoz Breath. Only when the viewer comes close enough to breathe on the steel disc does the face become visible. The viewer's breath brings life. Only through paying very close attention can one both see and know. Through their art, these artists fight amnesia in their own countries as a stay against such atrocities happening again. And through their art, they ask us, as Americans, to question what role our own country played in supporting the Latin American governments which killed their own people as a matter of course. The forces of evil are as indebted to those who chose not to know as to those who chose to forget.

Laurel Reuter, Director
North Dakota Museum of Art