Fondation

Popsicles, created in 1982–1984, is a response to the political situation in Chile. In 1973 a coup overthrew the leftist government of President Salvador Allende. Over the following 17 years, the country was governed by the military regime of Augusto Pinochet, and according to conservative estimates, nearly 30,000 people were tortured and several thousand more were killed. In Popsicles, Camiruaga films her teenage daughters licking popsicles from which little plastic soldiers emerge, while they recite the Hail Mary. This seemingly innocent act discloses the threat of violence that women were subjected to under Pinochet’s dictatorship. Camiruaga also confronts the quasi-sexual, quasi-pop-cultural image of teenage girls with traditionally conceived religiosity and masculinity, interweaving them with the context of relations with authoritarian politics.

Gloria Camiruaga

Gloria Camiruaga studied Philosophy at the University of Chile, and then Video Art at the San Francisco Art Institute, graduating in 1980. At the time, she was focused on making political video art concerned with social action and women’s issues. After spending a period of time in the US, she returned to Chile where she became an accomplished documentary filmmaker with a clear political and social conscience. Her films include: Casa Particular (1990); Nicanor Parra, co-directed with Lotty Rosenfeld (1991); and The Mines of the Mines (1993). Her last film One Day Later was released in 2006, the year that she passed away.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist whose moving image work is entangled with Boalian theater, expanded cinema, and feminist practices. She tends to work with non-actors, and incorporates improvisation into her process. Her recent work is on the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements, using everyday poetic thought and feminist experiments with language and narrative. Recent solo exhibitions include: Oriana in PIVO, Sao Paulo; the 34th Sao Paulo Biennial; MOMENTA Biennale de l’image; and Gosila in Der Tank, Basel. Her work is part of public and private collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, KADIST, and The Guggenheim Museum, among others. She has received a Creative Capital grant, a USA Fellowship, a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, and the 2021 Artes Mundi Prize, which was shared among all seven nominees.