Silvia Levenson solo show opens at the Murano Glass Museum in Venice

Argentinian-born artist Silvia Levenson's traveling exhibition "Identidad Desaparecidos ('Missing Identity' in English)" has been on view in Buenos Aires, Spain, France, Latvia, and at the Katzen Center at American University in the Washington D.C. area. An examination of the lingering trauma experienced by Argentine society under brutal dictatorship that Levenson and her young family fled will open in her adopted country of Italy on March 12th (Levenson has been living here since 1980). On Saturday, the Murano Glass Museum will open Levenson's first solo  exhibition in Venice, and it will include a unique site-specific work that will circle the gallery area with 119 kiln-cast baby clothes represting the number of the children taken from their mothers who, thanks to the ongoing efforts of the "Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo" have been able to learn their biological identity through DNA testing.

The exhibition, which will run through September 11, 2016, is dedicated to the mothers and grandmothers who gathered in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to seek the identities of the newborns who were ripped away from their political prisoner mothers who were put to death.

"Even if the children of the desaparecidos are now adults, in my work I always speak of children," Levenson says in a prepared statement, "because it is in childhood that the trauma originated, when the soldiers, replacing the democratic organs of Argentine society, took the right of leaving alive or killing parents denying any family identity.” The issue is deeply personal for Levenson whose family was directly impacted by the years of military dictatorship in the 1970s.

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