Artist and Society

This sculpture is a scale model of the Burj El Murr building in Beirut, Lebanon. The tower was owned by members of the el-Murr family, a prominent political clan. Construction began in 1974 but it was left unfinished after the outbreak of civil war. Originally an office block, it was only ever used as a sniper outpost. The tower is too tall to knock down and too dense to implode, and so continues to dominate the skyline. It is now seen as a memorial to the internal conflict that has never really been resolved.

Choucair is one of the few Lebanese artists of her generation devoted to geometric abstraction. Her approach developed in response to two distinct influences: Islamic art and the avant-garde art scene of Paris in the 1940s, where she was a student. Like many of her paintings, it uses the two basic elements of Islamic design – the straight line and the curve – as a starting point to create simple shapes which she places in rhythmic dialogue.

Metzger described auto-destructive art as ‘a public art for industrial societies’. His first demonstration was at the Temple Gallery, London, on 22 June 1960. At first Metzger was hidden behind a pane of glass covered with a white nylon sheet. He applied a hydrochloric acid solution to the fabric with a brush. As the nylon dissolved, he slowly became visible through the holes. The presentation also included waste in plastic bags and models for auto-destructive sculptures. This recreation was made for the exhibition Art and the Sixties: This was Tomorrow in 2004 at Tate Britain.

Each of these prints captures two moments, months or years apart. They show graves in the cemetery of Puerto Berrío, a town on the banks of the Magdalena river in Colombia. For decades, the site has been the resting place for unidentified bodies found on the shores of the river. They are rescued by the villagers of Puerto Berrío and buried in the town cemetery. They are known as ‘NN’s ‘Nomen Nescio’ or ‘No Names’. Echavarría spent years visiting the site, gaining trust and permission from the community. Through his lens, he preserves and records this act of mourning, which he sees as a form of collective resistance. In some cases, families from Puerto Berrío have renamed the deceased with names of loved ones who also lost their lives in the country’s more than 50-year-long civil war.

The fabric of Flag I contains traces of blood, soil and other substances from the sites of murders around the northern border of Mexico, testifying to the thousands of violent deaths associated with the powerful drug cartels that control smuggling routes to the United States. Another version of this work was shown at the Venice Biennial in 2009, where Margolles represented Mexico with an exhibition titled What Else Could We Talk About? As the government failed to intervene in the drug wars, the blood-stained cloth was hung outside the Mexican pavilion as a memorial for citizens that the nation ignored.