In 1992, through the Chapultepec Peace Accords signed between the El Salvador Government and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the internal armed conflict which had destabilised the country since 1970 was finalised. The history of war, identity and emigration form some of the interrogations conducted by El Salvador’s contemporary art, which emerged amid the country’s reconstruction from the 1990s onwards.

Un movimiento concreto I-VI (A Concrete Movement I-VI, 2018), by Karlos Cárcamo, is a sculpture made with vinyl records acquired from a second-hand shop in central San Salvador. The records have been folded at a 90-degree angle and assembled to create a multitude of planes — a formal appropriation which references the works of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. In the 1960s, Clark made a series of circular sculptures from tin and hinges, titled the Bichos (Bugs), which the spectator could touch and manipulate. In re-examinations of those imaginaries, Cárcamo combines visual references hailing from “low” and “high” culture, modernity and urban culture, with the use of vinyl records and the graffiti adorning the bases.

In Central American art over the past few decades, gestures of urban popular culture have taken on new connotations to build an image on contemporaneity and ways of gazing at and narrating the present. High up on a wall in the room is the written phrase Una nunca sabe (One Never Knows, 2018), an installation by artist Abigail Reyes which evokes the uncertainty sparked by the social situation in El Salvador. The piece belongs to a series of works titled Poesía popular (Popular Poetry): phrases taken from daily conversations and presented as large-scale murals in public spaces. Moreover, the political dimension of the texts, the feminist connotation, and performativity that the phrases acquire on the streets all point to the influence of conceptual practices in the 1960s that were customary in Latin America.

Language also articulates the work of Ernesto Bautista in an intervention made inside cargo trucks that cross Central America and Mexico on their way to the US border. From popular practices of vehicle signage, describing a predominantly male urban culture, Bautista creates the video Nuevas promesas (New Promises, 2012), where he records the lettering of those containers with large poetic texts — “The light of the night stops with me”, “Just like the sun, but death”, “It might be a border but I promise not to stop” — thereby casting light on the transient hope of millions of migrants attempting to navigate the dangerous route north.

Nowadays, emigration is still an alternative for part of the El Salvador population struggling with poverty, a reality referred to in the photographic series Faraway Brother Style (2009-2011), by Walterio Iraheta, a record of popular architecture styles in the country, the housing built by families of emigrants through the remittances they send, particularly from the United States.