With Mike and our friend Dalhel, I visited three of Montevideo’s museum galleries on the weekend. We checked out the exhibition of masks from Nicaragua at the Museo Arte Precolumbiano y Indigeno, MAPI which was lively and interesting as ever. I’m a bit partial to the concept of masks, the motivation to wear one, and how they effect the wearer. Sometime next year there’ll be a call for entries for “masks” in textiles by South American artists, and those selected will be displayed at MAPI, and yes, I hope to enter that. Some modern objects and paintings formed a dialogue with items of precolumbian artifacts collected by Augusto Torres and Elsa Andrada. In the permanent section were some wonderful very early precolumbian artefacts from this and other South American regions, and there’s always something there I haven’t seen before. Our next stop was something to eat and drink at one of our favourite places, the Mercado Agricola, which was new to Dalehl.

We then called in at the nearby exhibition of the National Visual Arts Prize at Espacio de Arte Contemporaneo which was really interesting. In a former cell in this historic city gaol was this installation, which strongly reminded me of all my lecture notes, assignments and files from years at university, all collected up and organised for the end-of-year-exams preparation we called ‘swot-vac’ (I was never this organised…)

At this gallery the works were mostly digital and audio-visual experiences, including a pair of young people doing a coordinated, very slowmotion performance which had them moving from one end of the entry gallery to the other while we were there. There were no facial expressions, no sound, just the same slow, coordinated movement. As we left I said ‘gracias!’ and neither of them blinked or twitched, which was interesting. Other exhibits were even more odd, like the video of a flamingo wandering along a sealed highway heading towards a mountain range… if we’d stayed all afternoon we’d not have seen an outcome to that strange story. That sort of thing makes me feel really out of touch with, um, some area of contemporary thinking.

We moved on to the Museo Nacional Artes Visuales, MNAV where first display inside the entry was the one I particularly wanted to see. Margaret Whyte’s latest textile exhibition, “Time To Listen” has just opened there, and will show until February 2nd next year. Mike didn’t spend a lot of time over it, commenting it reminded him of Ivan’s (teenage) bedroom many years ago, and that resonated! On the other hand, Dalehl and I spent a lot of time discussing our responses, so we were anything but silent, but we were listening in a manner of speaking. We felt the black paint over strong coloured salvaged materials and the large stitches that Margaret’s constructions require, added a note of gloom, referring to something horrible and ugly. Careful examination showed us the middle assembly contained several headless torsos (or were they dressmaker’s dummies?) and quite a number of forms that suggested writhing or broken limbs bound together by cording and strips of garbage bags – surely bodies in tangled wreckage – were these drowned immigrants, or victims of foul play washed up on a shore?

From the moment of birth every human comes into contact with textiles we’re wrapped and then clothed in; and we remain in contact with fabric and textiles throughout our lives. A large quantity of discarded fabrics of all kinds were gathered for these pieces, and I felt this whole installation to be a commentary on the excesses and shifting imbalances of the modern world, the politics of commerce and power, in which even humans themselves can become bundles to be traded or discarded.

I’m also wondering yet again, what do artists do with large installations once an exhibition’s ended? Do these works contain fabrics recycled several times over from earlier installations by Margaret Whyte in her lengthy and prolific career? I think I may have to go back another time.