Exhibition: “Liliana Porter: Actualidades / Breaking News”

Installation view of Liliana Porter: Actualidades / Breaking News at San José Museum of Art, July 28, 2023–February 25, 2024. Photo: Glen Cheriton, Impart Photography. 

Liliana Porter: Actualidades / Breaking News—my first curatorial project at the San José Museum of Art—opened earlier this summer.

Liliana Porter works in the spaces between reality and fiction. With an ongoing practice spanning more than six decades, Porter is best known for her photographs, installations, and videos that feature an eccentric cast of toys and souvenirs in open-ended situations. Liliana Porter: Actualidades / Breaking News provides a focused presentation of the artist’s use of simple and humorous gestures to disrupt notions of linear time and narrative cohesion.

The centerpiece of this exhibition is Porter’s video work Actualidades / Breaking News (2016), which is on view for the first time at the Museum since entering the collection. The video is structured like a newscast, comprising thirty consecutive segments. Each scene is preceded by a heading, such as “Arts and Leisure” and “World News,” and accompanied by a dramatic score composed by sound designer Sylvia Meyer. The combinations of text and sound underscore the drama, humor, and tragedy of otherwise ambiguous situations acted out by toys, souvenirs, figurines, and other knickknacks. While Porter’s carefully structured vignettes invite us to relate to the inanimate objects as human surrogates, her explicit cinematic editing disrupts a direct correlation between reality and its representations and emphasizes the varied and contradictory meanings of things.

In short, Porter’s Actualidades / Breaking News is a humorous and incredibly smart study in theater, cinema, and news reporting.

The exhibition received the following press:

Patricia Albers, “Patrica Albers on Liliana Porter,” Squarecylinder, September 25, 2023.