Leandro Katz. Buenos Aires, 1938. Works and lives in Buenos Aires.
A visual artist, writer, and filmmaker known for his films and his photographic installations, his works include long-term projects dealing with Latin American subjects that incorporate historical research, anthropology, and visual arts.
The Catherwood Project (1985-95) is a photographic reconstruction of Stephens and Catherwood’s two 1850s expeditions into the Mayan regions of Central America and Mexico.
The documentary film The Day You'll Love Me (1997) investigates the events surrounding the capture and execution of Ernesto Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. Following a process of iconographic research on this topic, he went on to produce an accumulative series of graphic and photographic installations titled Project for The Day You’ll Love Me which has been exhibited at the Galeria Nina Menocal, Mexico, the I.C.I., Buenos Aires, El Museo del Barrio, New York, the Bienal de Arte de La Habana, Cuba, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, among others. These works form part of the recently published book The Ghosts of Nancahuazu (2010).
In Paradox he adds depth to his research into Mayan archeology and history by addressing the political and cultural ramifications of the contiguity between the archeological site at Quirigua, Guatemala, and the plantations of the now-defunct United Fruit Company, then called ‘the Yunai.’
His installation Vortex is based on the classic Latin American novel La Vorágine by José Eustasio Rivera and addresses the social and literary history of the rubber industry in the Amazon region of the Putumayo River, particularly focusing on the atrocities committed against indigenous peoples there during the rubber boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Following Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report, Vortex was exhibited at PROA in 2004.
And Tania, Masks and Trophies, exhibited at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in 2007, is a project that examines the figure of Tamara Bunke, the only woman to had fought alongside Che Guevara in his last campaign of 1967. Exhumación, his film interview with Alejandro Inchaurregui, founding member of the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense - EAAF, was included in the exhibition.
Leandro Katz has produced books and artists’ books, and seventeen narrative and non-narrative films. His latest artists’ book dealing with matters of time and daily life, S(h)elf Portrait, was published in Buenos Aires in 2008. His most recent books, Natural History and The Ghosts of Ñancahuazú, were published in 2010.
Recent exhibitions include Encuentros de Pamplona 72: fin de fiesta del arte experimental (Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid), Natural History (Henrique Faría Gallery, NY), Imán-New York (Proa, Buenos Aires), 10,000 Lives (Gwangju Biennale, Korea, 2010), A (Los Alfabetos), 11x7 Gallery, Buenos Aires, 2011) and Arrebatos, diagonales y rupturas (Fundación Telefónica, Buenos Aires, 2013) curated by Bérénice Reynaud.
For his work he has received support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (USA), and the Hubert Bals Fund (Holland), among many others.
Leandro Katz was a member of the faculty at the School of Visual Arts, New York, the Semiotics Program at Brown University, Rhode Island, and a professor of Film Production and Theory at the School of Art and Communication, William Paterson University, New Jersey. Since 2005 he has resided in Buenos Aires.