Profile of the Peruvian Woman (1980-1981)

Teresa Burga (Iquitos, Peru, 1935) is one of the representatives of the renovation of Peruvian art during the sixties and seventies. As part of the Grupo Arte Nuevo (New Art Group, 1966-1968) and subsequently developing her individual practice, she was one of the precursors of the dissolution of the art object incorporating experimental processes and new creative strategies to produce a rigorous body of conceptual work.

The project undertaken by the artist for the SAPS is the materialization of a sculptural sketch that was part of the project Perfil de la mujer peruana (Profile of the Peruvian Woman), created in collaboration with Peruvian psychologist Marie-France Cathelat during 1980-1981. The project was originally presented in 1981 during the I Coloquio de Arte No-Objetual y Arte Urbano (1st Symposium of Non-Objectual and Urban Art) at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Medellín, Colombia; months later it was shown in an exhibition at the Banco Continental in Lima, Peru; by the end of that same year, the full investigation came together as a published book. The recovery of this project seeks to revisit a reflective process encouraged by an artistic proposal–one that analyzes the status of women from their affective, psychological, sexual, social, educational, cultural, linguistic, religious, professional, economic, political and legal aspects–that took part of second-wave feminism in Latin America.

The sketch for the sculpture now presented at the SAPS–a diagram of the female reproductive system that became the image of the project– was never made into an object because at the time, the artist couldn’t find a way to produce the piece. Hence the inscription on the sketch: Proyecto no realizable. Escala 1/x (Non Realizable Project. Scale 1/x), through which Teresa left the possibility of producing it in ambiguous terms.

Thus, in the context of a series of research projects aimed towards the recovery of Latin American historical figures, we retrieve Teresa’s non-object-based approaches, paradoxically producing an object. This allows us to revisit and update an artistic practice anchored to the historic and social context from which it emerged while reassessing the strategies of use and display of information in contemporary art.