Jorge Tacla: Time the destroyer is time the preserver

While Jorge Tacla was only an adolescent during the 1973 coup against Chile’s democratically-elected socialist president Salvador Allende, the upheaval left an irrevocable mark on his politics and practice. A third-generation Chilean of Palestinian and Syrian descent, the artist has been working between Santiago and New York since 1981, unravelling the intricate geopolitical causalities binding Latin America, West Asia and the United States. 

Over the last four decades, the artist’s practice has unfolded alongside major transformations in visual politics around human rights. The world has seen satellite imagery increasingly supplant personal testimony as the dominant form of historicising and adjudicatingmass atrocities. Far removed from politics on-the-ground, this mode of witnessing has further amplified a geopolitical order in which certain human lives are valued more than others. 

Amidst a visual culture dominated by machine vision, Tacla’s paintings place a renewed urgency on human faculty and memory in navigating the complexities of representation and interpretation. Rather than painting a building or landscape directly, he depicts it ‘in negative’, leaving the object defined by the absence of colour. In this sense, his paintings operate as meta-images—images about how the mind perceives an image— that allow us to unpack how events are inscribed within individual and collective consciousness. 

Examining how enduring truths can be excavated in the aftermath of a destructive incident, Time the destroyer is time the preserver is titled after a line from a T.S. Eliot poem referenced in one of Tacla’s notebook drawings. Structured as eight chapters, the artist’s largest solo presentation to date follows his practice as he confronts supposed hierarchies of human suffering; the false binaries of victimisation and perpetration; and the connections between seemingly disparate incidents to the structural violence underpinning them.

The exhibition is curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, with Abdulla Aljanahi, Curatorial Assistant at the Foundation.