Lotty Rosenfeld. ‘By Pass’

A key figure in Latin American video art, Lotty Rosenfeld (Santiago de Chile, 1943–2020) created a profoundly unique body of work rooted in the convergence of political resistance to state violence and a conception of images as a space for critical questioning, essential to transforming the present.

During Chile’s dictatorship, a time when public protest was forbidden and photographic or filmic documentation was banned, Rosenfeld’s practice emerged through a series of public space interventions. These acts challenged the silence imposed by the political-military regime and called on the community to imagine new forms of collective participation. The resonance of her early gestures shaped her later work, which continued to explore the most contentious edges of neoliberal politics.

This exhibition, titled after one of her works and a central concept in her artistic practice, brings together a significant selection of her video pieces, alongside photographic materials that reflect her essential contribution to thinking through images. The way she documented her actions and the editing and reassembling processes that combined her own photographs with public archives defy standardized modes of interpretation and assert the power of images to transgress imposed meaning.

Marta Dahó and Alejandra Coz Rosenfeld
Curators