LAST CHANCE 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. Titled after a line from a TS Eliot poem, Tacla’s “most expansive presentation to date” examines how enduring truths can be excavated in the aftermath of a destructive incident.

Structured as eight ‘chapters’, the exhibition traces Tacla’s sustained challenge to the supposed hierarchies of human suffering, false binaries of victim and perpetrator, and the structural violence connecting seemingly disparate events; the paintings reassert the primacy of human memory and perception in navigating the complexities of representation and interpretation. By depicting buildings and landscapes ‘in negative’, the artist defines form through absence, “creating images that reflect on how events are inscribed within individual and collective consciousness”.