Curated by Eugenio Dittborn

Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn is perhaps best known for the “Airmail Paintings” he has been producing since 1983. These heterogeneous spreads of imagery—dyed, embroidered, rubbed, and silk-screened onto vast swaths of fabric and paper—are folded, packaged, and shipped to their sites of exhibition, to be subsequently displayed alongside the envelopes that bear the traces of their geographic movement. The motif of anonymous faces that pervades Dittborn’s project cannot help but bring to mind the Pinochet dictatorship, but layered connections drawn between image repositories of different cultures and eras suggest a broader spectrum of associations. At MAVI, thirteen “Pinturas aeropostales” will fill all six of the institution’s galleries, while four previously unseen videos by the artist will be projected next door at the Museo Arqueológico de Santiago.

— Daniel Quiles