New Devotions at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center brings together six artists from Puerto Rico and the diaspora, exploring their relationships and experiences with different traditions, including folk Catholicism, African diasporic religions, Indigenous rituals, and Spiritism, and the ties between them.
Due to the religious hierarchies imposed by colonial powers for more than 500 years, the exchange of spiritual beliefs and their material components saw the formation and evolution of syncretic doctrines. While candles, images of saints, and other idols are common in households in Puerto Rico, the meanings owners ascribe to them can be unexpected. In a statement for the exhibition, curator Laura Rivera writes, “Syncretism creates new spiritual imaginations that wouldn’t exist without the exchange of different cultures.” She adds, “Growing up, my aunt had an image of Saint Barbara, but when I would ask who it was she would say ‘Shango.’”
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“If I Was Ever Holy” (2023) presents artist Kiván Quiñones-Beltrán’s personal cosmology. He adapts wooden drawers found on the street, as his ancestors did, to create an altar that contains various portals: in one drawer is a photograph of a Black child holding an image of Jesus and a collage of children at the Calvary, while images of Caravaggio’s “David Holding Goliath’s Head,” a cover of Paradise Lost, and found objects are in others. Quiñones-Beltrán also incorporates elements from his research into divination rituals from Congo, Ghana, and Mali, such as a Nkisi figure, an object an ancestral spirit inhabits. By putting these in conversation with each other, he questions the Christian belief systems ingrained in him at an early age, while considering his ties to these African regions that shape his practice.
In Natalia Lassalle-Morillo’s video “La Ruta” (2018), the artist documents her travels through the Panoramic Route, a connection of multiple highways that extend from coast to coast through the central mountain range of Puerto Rico, invented as a tourist attraction by the island’s government in the 1960s. The artist explores the route as a preconceived ideal of progress and beauty, confronting its now-abandoned infrastructure and the current state of affairs for communities along these roads. The video uses oral histories to unveil narratives that have been lost or obscured in Puerto Rican society as well as the syncretic experiences that are displayed in the show: at one point near the beginning a woman converses about a Marian apparition that supposedly occurred in her town; later, a group of older men speak about their rural town of Cayey being stuck in time. Ultimately, the work paints a picture of a region where people perpetually wait for validation from the Catholic Church and the US government’s intentions with federal assistance and future plans regarding the island’s sovereignty.
The works in the exhibition offer insight into how these artifacts and beliefs have come into existence and permeated organized ideologies and religions. The artists share a search for overlooked pasts and traditions to better understand their own spiritualities. In turn, they tap into the deities and intangible forces that inform their artistic endeavors and guide their intentions as they move in, and outside, an island colony filled with doctrines, myths, and inconsistencies both spiritual and political.
New Devotions continues at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center (107 Suffolk Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through April 15. The exhibition was curated by Laura Rivera.
Source: Hyperallergic.com