REDCAT Director Ruth Estévez Links Vietnam-era Anti-war Piece to Today

Ruth Estévez, gallery director at REDCAT LA, takes us behind-the-scenes of PAMM’s latest  exhibition The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War, linking Léon Ferrari’s literary collages to today’s current political climate.

“This exhibition, even though it was created in 1967, it is extremely timely, for many different reasons,” said Estévez. “We have been in a loop where the same problem has always been going on. We have different enemies, we have different goals, but the problem is always the same. It’s who has the power and who has the authority to use this power.”

Ferrari was an Argentinian artist (b. 1920, Buenos Aires; d. 2013, Buenos Aires) known for his political art. This exhibition focuses on his influential practice from the 1960s to the 1980s. With a particular emphasis on his literary collages—works that incorporate text excerpts from different sources that are reassembled to create an altogether new message—the exhibition features the first full live reading of his seminal 1967 publication Palabras ajenas (The Words of Others)—an important Vietnam-era anti-war piece written in the form of a dramatic script.

The Words of Others is on view through August 12, 2018.

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