Visual Borders of Transition
Art, Advertising, and Media Culture in the Return to Democracy in Chile

Drawing on a meticulous review of public and private archives, art historian and curator Sebastián Vidal Valenzuela presents an unprecedented overview of visual arts in the early years of Chile's so-called democratic transition. With theoretical and historiographical acumen, he delves into the cultural transformations of the period, illuminating previously unnoticed connections between works produced after Pinochet's fall and the rhetorical and media strategies that accompanied the installation of the neoliberal model in Chile. Works, exhibitions, videos, films, books, magazines, posters, advertisements, and television programs, as well as institutional cultures and countercultures, are examined from a perspective that, far from placing art in an aesthetically exclusive zone, considers it a critical discourse both immersed in and implicated in key phenomena of the transition culture, such as the televised "NO" campaign, Chile's representation at the Seville Expo '92, and the Santiago School.