As a young gay man in late-’70s Colombia, artist Miguel Angel Rojas used to hang out at the Faenza cinemas in Bogotá, a popular gay casual-sex hot spot. Amid incognito hookups in the bathroom stalls, Rojas photographed the theater (as well as the frisky business in the stalls via a hidden camera), and those ghostly, long-exposure 1979 “Serie Antropofagia” images were later used in a 2002 film to chronicle the decay of the once famous if infamous meeting ground. As part of FotoFest 2006, Sicardi Gallery will showcase 40 of Rojas’s moody photographs, as well as several drawings and works on paper. Through the pieces, Rojas tells a striking, subversive story of Colombia and its underworld of sex, drugs and war.
March 10-April 22
This article appears in Mar 16-22, 2006.