Exhibition catalogue from Certain Encounters: Daros-Latin America Collection at the Belkin (7 April-4 June 2006) with an essay by Keith Wallace. Certain Encounters presents the work of 21 artists who have made important contributions to visual art in Latin America. The Daros-Latin America Collection is based in Zürich, Switzerland and was initiated in 2000. It currently includes more than one hundred artists from all regions of Latin America and the works focus primarily on the past 20 years with important examples included from the 50s, 60s and 70s. One of the main challenges in working with a collection is making a selection from a finite number, a selection of works that already has an identity determined by a particular acquisition program. This necessitates a process of curating an entity that is, a sense, already curated. Rather than attempting to extract a thematic exhibition from the collection or to provide a linear overview of Latin American art, this exhibition emphasizes three important areas from the past five decades. They include abstract, perceptual work from the 1960s and 1970s, conceptual language-based work from the 1970s and 1980s and the more overtly social/political work of the past twenty years. The work of many of these artists has never been seen before in Vancouver. Certain Encounters includes work by Carmelo Arden Quin, Fernando Arias, Waltercio Caldas, Luis Camnitzer, Iván Jesús Capote Puentes, Lygia Clark, Carlos Cruz–Diez, Antonio Dias, Juan Manuel Echavarria, León Ferrari, Jorge Macchi, Teresa Margolles, Ana Mendieta, Vik Muniz, Oscar Muñoz, Hélio Oiticica, Manuel Piña, Nelson Ramos, Lázaro Saavedra, Santiago Sierra and Melanie Smith.
