Omar López-Chahoud
Building the ICAC. Episode 2 (audio in Spanish)
The Cáder Institute of Central American Art (ICAC) is an organization dedicated to the study, research, and dissemination of the practices, scenes, and histories of Central American art and its diasporas. It is housed within the Department of Studies at the Museo Reina Sofía. Its work unfolds across multiple programs and tempos: on the one hand, it seeks to contribute to the enrichment of knowledge about the art of this region through the Museum’s Collections, Library, residencies, and study programs; on the other, it aims to weave dialogues, collaborations, and connections based on reciprocity with the cultural scene in Central America. This is a pioneering initiative in its field, not only for giving visibility to a region historically overlooked by historiography, but also for advancing ways of working that, through structural imagination and research, generate lasting networks and projects.
This capsule is part of one of the Institute’s initiatives, which aims to shape a possible oral history of contemporary Central American art. Through a constellation of voices from the fields of artistic creation, research, curating, and cultural management, this project gathers a mosaic of perspectives and experiences around different episodes that have defined local and regional scenes in recent decades. It also brings together testimonies on individual and collective practices that help outline the range of aesthetic languages and currents of thought that define this territory. In this tentative history—born from conversation, orality, and listening, and avoiding any totalizing ambition—there lies a need to seek more porous, mutable, and affective ways of constructing narratives, creating archives, and generating interpretive communities around them.
This first series, titled Building the Cáder Institute of Central American Art, explores the process behind the creation of the ICAC and its main predecessor, the Y.ES Contemporary Institute—an organization that, over the past decade, has been a key reference point in energizing contemporary art in El Salvador. One of the key figures in its development was curator Omar López-Chahoud, currently the Institute’s International Director and the central figure of the second episode of this series.
Participants
Omar López-Chahoud
is an independent curator based in New York. After earning Master of Fine Arts degrees from the Yale School of Art at Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut) and the Royal Academy of Arts in London, he has served as Artistic Director and Curator of Untitled Art (Miami Beach, Florida) since its founding in 2012, and as International Director of Y.ES Contemporary – The Robert S. Wennett and Mario Cáder-Frech Foundation. He has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions both within and outside the United States, and has participated in curatorial discussion panels at Artists’ Space, Art in General, MoMA PS1, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In this capsule, López-Chahoud reflects on his trajectory as a curator closely linked to Central American art, from his involvement in the 9th Nicaragua Biennial of Visual Arts in 2014 to the present. Throughout the interview, he describes a Central American scene composed of highly diverse regions, shaped by different traditions that nevertheless converge—paradoxical as it may seem—into a shared identity with a distinctive character: “a visceral art.” This is an art shaped by violence and instability, produced both within Central America and across its diasporas. Ultimately, Omar reflects on the past and present of the Central American art scene, and then imagines a desirable future and the role that ICAC can play in building it.
Recording: Irene Fernández Campo / Editing and production: Rubén Coll / Narration: Elena Corrales Pérez / Texts: Elena Corrales Pérez, Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga, Margarita Rodríguez Ibáñez and Lola Visglerio Gómez
Interview: Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga
With the support of the Museo Reina Sofía Foundation (USA) and the Museo Reina Sofía Foundation