Last Monday August 14 at noon we were joined by artist Carlos Arias and critic and academic Diego Parra for a discussion at Il Posto Documentos. The talk revolved around Aria’s exhibition «Chile: Amnesia de Verdad», presented at the National Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina.

Carlos Arias was born in Santiago de Chile in 1964. As a consequence of the military dictatorship in Chile, Carlos Arias went into exile with his family in Mexico, where he lived from 1975 to 1983. He returned to Chile to study plastic arts and later completed a master’s degree at UNAM in Mexico City in 1988. In 1994 he decided to abandon painting and dedicate himself to embroidery as a means for conceptual reflection, being also a point from which to criticize identity representation and gender issues in postcolonial America, retaking painting in 2004. He has been a professor at the Universidad de las Américas Puebla for two decades.

His career has developed internationally and, in particular, in Mexico, where his work has been widely recognized and curated by leading art historians in Latin America as the chief curator of the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo ( MUAC), Cuauhtemoc Medina.

He has participated in: First Liverpool Biennial, England, 1999; ARS 01 Kiasma, Finland; San Diego Museum of Art, 2002; Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Netherlands, 2002; Il Racconto del Filo, Italy, 2003; Eco: contemporary Mexican art, Spain, 2005; Platform 01, Mexico, 2006; The era of discrepancy, Mexico; IV Prague Biennale, 2009; Neomexicanisms, MAM, Mexico, 2011; The naked man, Munal and Self-portraits in the common, Textile Museum of Oaxaca, 2014; The thread of life. Art Chapel. Puebla, 2015; The thread of life. Chopo CDMX University Museum, 2016; The thread is set. Marso CDMX Gallery, 2017; Against oblivion. ARTBO. Bogota, 2018; embroidery. International Baroque Museum. Puebla, 2019.