Originally organized as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (2017–18), an initiative of the Getty Foundation, this is the first solo exhibition of the Argentinian artist León Ferrari (b. 1920, Buenos Aires; d. 2013, Buenos Aires) in the United States, and features the first full performance of his seminal 1967 publication Palabras ajenas (The Words of Others).

The exhibition focuses primarily on Ferrari’s influential practice from the 1960s to the 1980s, with a particular emphasis on his literary collages, most notably Palabras ajenas, an important Vietnam-era anti-war piece written in the form of a dramatic script.

Ferrari considered his literary collages to be a central element of his practice, yet most remained unpublished or saw only minimal circulation as limited editions or sketchbooks.

This exhibition revisits many of these works, exploring uncharted territory and offering a new perspective on Ferrari’s work while exploring the aesthetic forms of political intervention that emerged in Latin America in the 1960s. This profoundly contemporary project examines the obscenity of war, the ways the media represents conflict, and the role of political and religious discourse in the expansion of Western culture.