Ivorypress

Cuts, burns, punctures
Ishmael Randall-Weeks
Meier Ramirez, 2016

This artist’s book by Peruvian born, New York and Cusco-based artist Ishmael Randall Weeks provides a meditation on recent Peruvian history.

For his 2013 multimedia installation he created a series of works using found slides from the 1970’s and 1980’s showing private family moments like weddings and vacations. He intervenes on the slides, he punctures, cuts, and draws upon them to destroy or transform the original memories. His interventions range from minimal to extreme, offering his personal response to Peru’s violent political and social history of the 1970’s and 80’s.

By damaging the slides, Weeks creates a metaphor for the political violence and social unrest that ‘scarred’ the country during those decades. The book explores how our collective memory of a place is often fragmented or ‘damaged’ by its past.

The book includes a text by Peruvian writer and curator Rodrigo Quijano as well as 2nd original altered slides.