This document consists of a curatorial text written by Jaime Cerón and the catalogue of images that record the works shown in the group exhibition, Corporales. The exhibition included works by the Colombians María Isabel Rueda, Juan Pablo Echeverri, Sofía Reyes, Luz Ángela Hernández, Jim Fankugen, Santiago Monge, Pablo Adarme, Manuel Quintero, Tulio Sampayo, and Guillermo Marín. It was held at the Galería Santa Fe in Bogotá in September and October 2002. In the text, Cerón gives the background of the organization of a group show dealing with “corporality” as a problem of contemporary art in Colombia, starting from the conceptualization of our experience with the body as the only effective vehicle of communication. To that end, the writer places his emphasis on understanding the body beyond its organic nature, generating, through the works, a discourse that expands the limits of belief, gender, and class. This allows the body to be presented as a factor in question, when historically, it contributed to the makeup of the society. The author invites the visitor to approach the exhibition from a personal sense of one’s own corporality and to have a direct experience with the work.

This document is important since it explains the structure of a group exhibition with the body as the central theme in its multiple facets, the body turned into the main material for a visual art investigation. Therefore, the show and the text attach special importance to the ever more prominent role of the body as an element in the construction and creation of images. This casts light on the role of the corporeal experience—a role played out in the multiple relationships that bear down on an exhibition, such as artist/work, artist/public, and public/work.  

This exhibition shows a complex panorama in which some elements highlighted by the writer Jaime Cerón (b. 1967) are clearer than others. It is worth noting that the awareness of the nature of the medium shared by all these works is the result of curatorial decisions made in designing the exhibition. A search for work that would reposition photography as a medium, working from its more traditional forms, generated a richness that allowed a reading of the “body” as a historical and sociopolitical factor. It seems that this quality did not just affect the images of the bodies shown in the photographs. Given the common denominator that each one of us possesses a body, it also generated reactions in each spectator and in a collective, common body. By the nature of the works, this common body had to extend its perception of gender, social class, and beliefs.  

The curatorial work is distinguished by not only showing works that represented the body; it also took a risk with some works that show the body as an entity that performs actions, a showing of corporeal practice as an experience that originates from and acts on the same body. This began to erase the boundary between the record of an action and the use of the body as a subject of the art.

Jaime Cerón, an art curator and critic based in Bogotá, was manager of the visual arts at the Instituto de Cultura y Turismo in Bogotá (1997–2007) and has taught courses at various art schools: Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, Universidad de los Andes, Universidad Nacional, Escuela Superior de Arte in Bogotá and the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. As of 2009, Cerón was a visiting professor in the history and theory of art at the Universidad de los Andes as well as an independent curator for several institutions such as the Museo de Antioquia in Medellín.