Maria Teresa Hincapié,
La vitrina (The shop window), 1990, © Santiago Zuluaga
María Teresa Hincapié
Vitrina

María Teresa Hincapié (*1956 †2008, Colombia) started her artistic career in the theatre as an actor. During the mid-1980s she shifted her attention to performance art and started investigating non-representational psychophysical practices; moreover, she embraced life as an artistic practice. Hincapié, as other Colombian creators at that time, was mobilized by Colombia’s extreme socio-political situation. The murder by drug cartels in 1982 of the Minister of Justice at the time, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, was a major event in a long history of violence involving governmental forces, drug trafficking syndicates, guerrilla groups, paramilitary forces and civilians. Hincapié used her body to respond to and resist a state of acute violence. The relevance of her foundational performance art work in Colombia compelled us to expand the re.act.feminism archive’s timeframe to include two of her pieces from 1990.

In Vitrina (Shop Window), during a six-hour period, Hincapié successively dirtied a store window with lipstick and cleaned it with soap. Dressed as a cleaning woman, she wrote sentences, drew her silhouette emphasizing sexual parts, and stamped kiss-marks on the glass. Her tasks addressed the invisibility of a clean- ing woman’s labour, the extreme appeal of commodities framed by shop windows, the objectification of the female body, and the political verve of a performance artist. EF

Courtesy Galeria Casas Riegner, Bogotá – Colombia

Document media
Video, colour, sound, 38:44 min

Issue date
1990

Tags
public space, inscription, labour, housework/carework, the common, sexualities