Chosen Memories Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond

Armando Andrade Tudela was born Lima, Peru (1975), and he lives and works in Lyon, France.

Andrade studied at Pontifícia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima, Perú, at the Royal College of Art, London, and at the Jan Van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht. He was a founding member of the artist-run space and art collective Espacio La Culpable, Lima, Perú (2002-2008).
The artist explores the intersecting interfaces between popular culture, politics and fine art. While frequently using the South American cultural and historical context as his starting point, on a deeper level Andrade Tudela’s work focuses on complex systems of translation and transference; how are aesthetic ideas assimilated and reactivated politically, or socially, at a local level? And more broadly speaking, how are ideas themselves embedded within the fabric of geography and physical topography?
He moves freely among a wide range of media and material. In his in-depth, research-driven projects, he frequently employs quasi-documentary techniques, such as recorded interviews and on-site photographic explorations, combining them with multiple references to history, politics and popular culture. At the same time, his drawings and objects combine visual directness and technical accomplishment with conceptual complexity.
By focusing on sites of temporal and geographic slippage, Andrade Tudela parses the hidden inner rhymes and subtle discordances within cultural history, ultimately undermining and even dismantling the cultural and historic framing structures his work examines.

His work is part of some of the most important international institutional collections such as: Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo de Arte de Lima, Lima; Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Today he is DNSEP art teacher (volume, installation), co-coordinator Master art, National School of Fine Arts of Lyon.

Elena Damiani was born in Lima, Peru (1979), where she lives and works.

She studied Architecture at the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas and subsequently transferred to the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Corriente Alterna where she graduated in Fine Arts in 2005. In 2010 she received her Masters in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Elena Damiani employs the disciplines of geology, geography, cartography, archaeology and astronomy to reinterpret such categorisations and our understanding of the physical world around us. Her fictional and constructed landscapes propose alternative readings of geological time, history and humankind’s classifications of evidence. Scientific source material, considered rational and immutable is presented as a cultural construct, subject to interpretation and infused with alternative value systems, redirecting for more poetic and suggestive readings. Damiani’s construction of fictions both emulates and disrupts our methodology of constructing meaning and knowledge via empirical observations. Her work reveals a search to gain understanding of how structures that obey a greater magnitude than the brief passage of man on Earth are composed and work. This search formulates a series of explorations which seek to reinterpret various natural stages and natural processes while confronting us with the idea we have of the world in which we live. Her most recent work explores fractures in time and geological events as symbols of constant change. The artist refers to geological features as indicators of a time before history. To Damiani, geology reveals the memory of the land.

Her work has been exhibited at the Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía C3A (2022), Dhaka Art Summit (2020), DePaul Art Museum (2020), MOCO Montpellier Contemporain (2020), Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisboa (2019), la Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Roma (2019); Skissernas Museum (Lund, 2017); Chrysler Museum of Art, (Virginia; 2017), Gwangju Biennale (2016), Bienal de Cuenca (2016), IV Poly/Graphic Triennial San Juan (2015), Vienna Biennale (2015), Venice Biennale (2015), Museo Amparo (Puebla, 2016); MUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo (Mexico City, 2015); Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow, 2015), MOCAD Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Detroit, 2015); Americas Society (New York, 2014), BIM Bienal de la Imagen y Movimiento (Buenos Aires, 2014), Mercosul Biennial (Porto Alegre, 2013), Museo Tamayo (Mexico City, 2013), MAC Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (Lima, 2013), Government Art Collection (London, 2012), Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia (2009), MAMBA Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2007), IVAM Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (Valencia, 2007), Kunstmuseum (Bonn, 2006).
She was awarded the Grants & Commissions Program Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation CIFO (2016), the Commission for a permanent site-specific installation at the Americas Society’s David Rockefeller Atrium in New York (2014), the Special Mention to Video Creation at the International Festival of Digital Arts and Cultures of Gran Canaria (2006), 2nd Prize at the French-Peruvian Contest for Visual Arts Pasaporte para un Artista (2006), the Gold and Silver at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Corriente Alterna (2005), the Production Prize in the 2nd Peruvian Contest Video and Electronic Arts (2004).
Work by the artist is included in international collections, including the MoMA The Museum of Modern Art, MALI Museo de Arte de Lima, GNAM Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, Art Jameel Collection, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Museo Tamayo, Kadist Art Foundation, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Schoepflin Foundation, PAMM Perez Art Museum Miami and FOLA Fototeca Latinoamericana. She currently lives and works in Lima.