Teresa Burga, an artist whose indefinable output made her one of the most important conceptual artists in Latin America, has died at 85. The Peruvian Ministry of Culture announced her death on Twitter on Thursday.
Today, Burga is considered a major figure for her boundary-pushing works focused on authorship, forms of labor, and the status of women in Peru, her home country. Her work has taken the form of sculptures, installations, drawings, paintings, and conceptual projects, in the process expanding what art could be.
Burga’s best-known work is one that during its day generated confusion. Perfil de la mujer Peruana (Profile of Peruvian Woman), from 1980–81, marked a collaboration with the psychotherapist Marie-France Cathelat, with whom Burga founded the Investigaciones Sociales y Artísticas, an institution through which they facilitated social research. For Burga’s project, she and Cathelat interviewed 290 middle-class women between the ages of 25 and 29 in Lima to obtain statistics on their political leanings, their bodies, and their identities. The presentation of their findings took the form of drawings and diagrams, as well as artworks, including a sculpture composed of quipus, knotted fabrics alluding to an Incan counting system.
Against the backdrop of Peru’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy, Burga’s project attempted to question how much agency women in the country had at the time. The exhibition created a media circus when it opened, and many seemed to miss what Burga and Cathelat were getting at. Critic Mirko Lauer was among the few who caught onto the duo’s methods, writing, “I wonder who would be talking about this event if the project had been described as the exhibition of some sociological panels on women in Peru rather than calling it a show of conceptual art. How many people who attended would not have attended and how many people who did not attend might have?”
Burga had focused on women, their bodies, and their rights before in her work, though it is unclear to what extent she identified with the feminist movement that took hold in many parts of the world during the 1960s and ’70s. Sometimes, Burga focused on her own body, as she did with the 1972 work Autorretrato. Estructura. Informe., 9.6.1972, for which she created a self-portrait via diagrams and charts of information related to her heart and blood. In subjecting herself to data systems, Burga was creating a self-portrait created not by her own hand but by the machines that surveilled her. “This work is a testimony to my experience, to how I experience the world today,” she once said.
Looked at now, Autorretrato parallels neatly with other conceptual experiments undertaken by U.S.-based feminist artists such as Martha Rosler, Mary Kelly, and Lynn Hershman Leeson during the era, but Burga’s work eluded viewers upon its exhibition in Peru. “Artist or Computer?” asked one publication at the time.
