On The Town: Works by artists from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala and Costa Rica, were unveiled at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma) this week.
"Many of the artists address the circumstances in which they are living," said Sebastián López, curator of the exhibition, which is called The Hours: Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America.
Some of the 31 artists, whose work in the show comprises a total of 121 pieces, came to Dublin for the opening. The work is from the Daros Latin American collection, a private collection of contemporary art with its own museum in Zürich, Switzerland.
Vesper, by Oswaldo Maciá, an artist from the Colombian city of Cartagena, is a symphony of approximately 60 different voices. According to the artist, who was present for the opening, the 20-minute composition is based on an aural archive of interviews with people from different countries.
Lázaro Saavedra, a Cuban artist on his first visit to Dublin, explained that he was interested in exploring the space between the floor and the ceiling in his pieces, The Spectator and the Work. His installation features 64 knives hanging at different levels from the ceiling and, on the floor below, nails standing in rows.
Also among the exhibiting artists was Betsabée Romero, from Mexico, whose works, Ayate Car and Requiem for the Unknown Pedestrian II, are in the show. The tyres that feature in the Requiem piece are engraved with signs of what they erase when they crash.
"The tyre is going in one direction; it's about speed, modernity and high technology. I am talking about the opposite, how we are fragile. The tyre is an emblematic object," she explained.
Artist Clare Langan, singer Katell Keineg and the artist and Imma board member Brian Ranalow, with his wife, Elsa, were among those who attended the opening night ceremony.
The Hours: Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America runs at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until Sun, Jan 15