Palimpsests of Violence: Geologies of Diaspora and Colonialism in the Work of Esther Vainstein

This paper analyzes early drawing- and sculpture-based installations of the Jewish Peruvian artist Esther Vainstein (b. 1947) to argue that she successfully carved out the space for herself in the male-dominated Peruvian cultural arena through the abstraction that ingeniously layered the familiar and new referents with profound local and transnational resonances. After the first public presentation of her meticulously hatched abstract pencil drawings in Galería 9 in Lima in 1980, Vainstein quickly started to represent her country internationally, including the XVII and XIX Biennial of Sao Paulo (1983 and 1987, respectively) and in the first and third Biennial of Havana (1984 and 1989). Through the evocative, geographically and culturally specific titles such as Paracas, Vainstein’s restrained crystalline large-scale compositions function as the postmodern update of the telluric vein of modernist abstraction associated with Peru since the early 1950s (most notably, through the painter Fernando de Szyszlo). Yet, Vainstein’s works reject gestural heroism and the iconography of the Andes to focus on the mundane and pain-staking, and the arid coastal desert, often with the addition of precarious materials to the exhibition spaces. While Peruvian critics of the era associated Vainstein with a new artistic generation indebted to conceptualism and preoccupied with the urbanizing Peruvian coast, I show how the funerary intimations in her work reveal a palimpsest of the histories of violence inherent to diaspora and colonialism that continue to be relevant to her identity as a woman, immigrant, and Jew and to multiple national and transnational histories today.