ANOTHER SPACE

Laura Aguilar (USA, b. 1959 – d. 2018)

A key figure in Chicanx and queer art, Laura Aguilar was born to a Mexican-American father and Mexican-Irish mother. Aguilar used photography to consider pressing subjects, such as mental health, equity in the art world, and her own doubly marginalized identity as a Mexican-American lesbian. Often focusing the camera on her own sizable body as a way of drawing attention to the complexities of identity for people in the Chicanx community, Aguilar expressed a space between her Mexican heritage and her experiences living in the United States. With the Nature Self-Portraits, begun in the mid-1990s, Aguilar once again turns to her own naked body set in the landscape of New Mexico’s rocky desert rather than the controlled studio environment. As Aguilar explained, she enjoyed photographing herself in nature, particularly in the desert, because she felt accepted by nature. Concentrating on her own body, one most often defined as obese, the artist redefines the male gaze as well as male dominated representations of beauty and the female body in wildlife. She further challenges concepts of the landscape genre as a male dominated field. Ultimately, Aguilar succeeds in alluding to larger issues of identity politics, race and underrepresented communities through her unique interpretation of landscape photography.

 

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili (Georgia, b. 1979)

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili approaches the medium of photography as a process of development and revelation. Often using a sense of humor, she questions the desire to preserve by incorporating silicone body parts as recurring motifs. Her compositions are typically staged either in her studio window or directly on the surface of light-sensitive film in a camera-less process. By combining experimental analog techniques with digital scanning, she creates images shaped by the traces and imperfections of their making. In one of her signature approaches, she starts with 4 x 5” negatives and ends with sharp, color-rich, digitally altered prints. Alexi-Meskhishvili also blurs the boundaries between studio, production, and exhibition. Through this integrated, experimental practice, she reimagines photography not as a fixed record, but as a fluid and evolving form.

 

Diane Arbus (USA, b. 1923 – d. 1971)

Diane Arbus is known for her unflinching portraits of people on the margins of conventional society. Her photograph Triplets in Their Bedroom, N.J. 1963 (1963) exemplifies her commitment to documenting the complexities of identity and familial roles within domestic spaces. The image presents three identical young girls posed stiffly in their shared bedroom, donning matching dresses and uniform solemn expressions. As in many of her portraits, Arbus captures a tension between surface appearance and psychological depth—what at first seems ordinary gradually reveals a quiet strangeness. Her work resists sentimentality, instead inviting a deeper engagement with themes of identity, vulnerability, and the social structures that shape self-presentation. In this way, Arbus redefined portraiture as a space for both recognition and disquiet.

 

Jaime Davidovich (Argentina, b. 1936 – USA, d. 2016

A pioneer of site-specific and media-based practices, Jaime Davidovich explored the intersections of public space, architecture, and visual disruption. In RAILROAD BRIDGE PROJECT (1973), Davidovich transformed an abandoned railroad bridge in Garrison, New York, by applying large swaths of adhesive tape directly onto its surface. Using this everyday material, he intervened in the landscape without permanently altering it, drawing attention to the overlooked edifices of infrastructure and their surrounding environments. The taped bridge challenged traditional ideas of sculpture, painting, and land art. Davidovich’s temporary gesture invited viewers to reconsider the aesthetics of decay, the role of art in public spaces, and the boundaries between art and life. Active in both the conceptual art and early video art scenes, Davidovich saw tape not only as a medium but as a metaphor for connection and fragility. With this work, he proposed a new kind of public engagement, one rooted in subtlety, impermanence, and critical observation.

 

Paz Errázuriz (Chile, b. 1944)

Paz Errázuriz’ photographs often portray the marginalized communities of Chilean society. In the series created between 1982-90 titled Adam’s Apple, Errázuriz depicts the everyday lives of transvestite prostitutes. Persecuted as homosexuals during the brutal military regime of Augusto Pinochet, Errázuriz’s subjects display no emotion but rather a stoic pride for their personal circumstance. Employing a poetic black-and-white mode, Errázuriz also hints at the emerging menace of the Aids epidemic in brothels such as those depicted in the series from Talca and Santiago.

 

José Luis Falconi (Peru, b. 1973)

José Luis Falconi is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and professor whose work interrogates the intersections of aesthetics, ethics, and social transformation. His artistic practice is deeply rooted in the belief that art serves as a catalyst for civic engagement and societal change. Through his creations, Falconi explores themes of identity, memory, and the role of art in public discourse, often challenging traditional narratives and prompting critical reflection. Falconi's approach is characterized by a commitment to participatory and dialogical methods, emphasizing the importance of community involvement in the artistic process. His works often blur the lines between artist and audience, inviting viewers to become active participants in the creation and interpretation of art. This methodology reflects his broader interest in the pedagogical potential of art and its capacity to foster democratic spaces for dialogue and understanding. In addition to his artistic endeavors, Falconi has contributed to the academic and curatorial fields, further enriching his practice with interdisciplinary perspectives. His multifaceted career underscores a dedication to exploring how art can both reflect and shape the human experience, particularly within the contexts of Latin American culture and global human rights issues.

 

Miguel Fernandez de Castro (Mexico, b. 1986)

Miguel Fernández de Castro is a visual artist based in the Sonora-Arizona borderlands. Through photography, video, sculpture, and writing, his work examines how extractive and criminal economies materially transform a territory while looking at the historical ties between environmental catastrophe, smuggling routes, and forced disappearance. In his work the desert is never an empty landscape, nor is it strictly a landscape: the lens with which Fernández de Castro approaches this environment allows us to intuit that, where seemingly there is nothing, everything is happening.

 

Fernell Franco (Colombia, b. 1942 – d. 2006)

Born in Versalles, Colombia in 1942, Fernell Franco and his family moved to Cali in 1951, displaced from their home due to La Violencia (1948-1958). Franco began working as a courier for a photography studio, where his interest in photography began. Eventually, when he turned 15, a local newspaper hired Franco as a photojournalist. Tasked with documenting Cali’s street life during a period of immense social, political, and cultural change, Franco became known for his ability to capture everyday life, photographing various social spaces like brothels, billiard halls, and Cali’s brightly painted cafes. In Serie Billares (1985), Franco offers an intimate glimpse into the billiard hall, an exclusively masculine space where men could socialize, play games, and drink. Though Franco would go on to work for major national newspapers and, later, as a fashion and advertising photographer, he remained dedicated to his photojournalistic work in Cali. Exploring the dramatic changes to the city’s industrial modernization Franco often employed formal tropes of Italian Neorealism and film noir while experimenting with formatting. Franco’s photographs captured a city in flux.

 

Sandra Gamarra (Peru, b. 1972)

In PAG 177, Sandra Gamarra transforms an imagined photographic catalog page into an oil painting. The images she uses are stills from Jordi Colomer’s video Simo (1997), originally shown at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Gamarra reuses these images in her Guided Visit MACBA (2007), recreating scenes of guided tours as part of a publication for the fictional Museo de Lima de Arte (LiMac). In this larger project, Gamarra critiques and reimagines the structures of art institutions. By translating these images from video to print to painting, she explores authorship, reproduction, and institutional framing of art. This process blurs the boundaries between video, photography, and painting, and the boundary between the artwork and its documentation. By appropriating a catalog page, Gamarra questions the supposed objectivity of photographic archives and reclaims agency over how her work is seen and historicized. Painting becomes a tool for slowing down the image and exposing underlying structures—museological, colonial, and psychological—that shape cultural understanding.

 

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Héctor García (Mexico, b. 1923 – d. 2012)

Héctor García's interest in photography grew out of his sense of social consciousness. Born and raised in an impoverished district of Mexico City, García first began taking pictures in the 1930s to illustrate protests by working-class people in which he was a participant. To inform others of this personal and political struggle, he organized a newspaper and used his photographs of student marches and related social events as illustrations. García then spent time traveling around northern Mexico and the eastern United States. He returned to Mexico in 1946 and began formally studying filmmaking and documentary photography. Social criticism continued to characterize his images. After working as a photojournalist for Mexican and international publications, he became involved with filmmaking and has since earned prestigious awards for his various endeavors in cinematography.

 

Beatriz González (Colombia, b. 1932)

A central figure in Colombia’s postwar avant-garde, Beatriz González is known for her association with Pop Art and her incisive engagement with social issues such as corruption and violence. Her work frequently draws on mass media, particularly newspaper imagery, to reflect on the political and cultural climate of her country. In Decoración de interiores, one of her most iconic works, González reproduces a press photograph originally published in the Bogotá newspaper El Tiempo. The image captured then-President Julio César Turbay Ayala at home, laughing and singing with guests before a curtain—seemingly oblivious to the escalating violence sanctioned by his own administration. By silk screening and repeating the image across fabric, González constructs another kind of curtain—one that both conceals and reveals the state’s abuses. Originally sold by the meter, the fabric strips the president’s image of institutional authority, reducing it to a decorative function. The work epitomizes González’s deft interplay between the literal and the symbolic, offering a subtle yet potent indictment of authoritarian regimes and the societal complacency that sustains them.

 

​​​​​​​​​​​In Los Papagayos, Beatriz González appropriated an image taken from a daily newspaper depicting a row of generals attending the unveiling of a fellow general’s commemorative bust. The photograph being appropriated in Los Papagayos was originally published in the newspaper El Tiempo featuring Miguel Vega Uribe, Belisario Betancur, Manuel Guerrero Paz, and other members of the armed forces. Rather than a portrait of the individual generals, González blurs and colors their faces repeatedly copied in quick succession in a way that obscures their individual identities. By denying the generals a more explicit likeness, González suggests that they are generic rather than unique, easily reproducible and replicable under autocratic rules of power. Furthermore, as the title “The Parrots” alludes to parrots’ mimetic behavior, González insinuated that generals repeat their leaders’ rhetoric and history itself is also repeated, while corrupt rulers continued to contribute violence to Colombia’s civil conflict which devastated the nation for decades.

 

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Martine Gutierrez (USA, b. 1989)

Martine Gutierrez uses photography and performance to examine the complexities of identity, particularly in relation to gender, race, class, and indigeneity. In Indigenous Woman (2018), Gutierrez assumes the roles of model, photographer, stylist, and art director to produce a glossy, 124-page fashion magazine that mimics the aesthetics of high-end editorial spreads. Through this elaborate publication, she satirizes and subverts the beauty industry’s idealized standards while reclaiming visual narratives for trans and Indigenous identities. Each image is meticulously constructed, featuring Gutierrez in a range of personas that reflect both appropriation and resistance, artifice and authenticity. By casting herself in every image, she challenges the gaze of both viewer and industry, asserting agency over how identity is constructed, consumed, and commodified. Indigenous Woman operates simultaneously as art object, critique, and performance, offering a layered interrogation of visibility, representation, and the power structures embedded in media.

 

Hermanos Mayo (Mexico, est. 1947)

The Hermanos Mayo—an exiled collective of Spanish photographers active in Mexico from the 1930s onward—are celebrated for their sharp, empathetic documentation of working-class life, political struggle, and cultural transformation. In their Circa series, the group turns its lens to mid-20th century Mexico, capturing a country in transition with striking immediacy and formal precision. The images present street vendors, laborers, students, and protesters in unguarded moments, revealing both the dignity and hardship of everyday life. Though rooted in photojournalism, the series transcends reportage through its compositional clarity and emotional resonance. The collective’s shared authorship challenges the idea of the singular artistic genius, reflecting instead a collaborative ethic rooted in political solidarity and antifascist resistance. With Circa, the Hermanos Mayo offer not only a visual archive of Mexico’s evolving social fabric but also a testament to photography’s role in shaping collective memory and political consciousness.

 

Hudinilson Jr. (Brazil, b. 1957 – d. 2013)

Born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1957, Hudinilson Jr. is best known for his subversive, erotic representations of the male figure. A gay man coming of age under Brazil’s military dictatorship, Hudinilson Jr. sought out spaces to live and work on the fringes of Brazil’s conservative society. A member of São Paulo’s experimental art scene and underground nightlife, the artist worked in a wide range of media including Xerox art, performance, collages, and notebooks. Hudinilson Jr. developed a practice that explored the transgressive nature of the gay male body under dictatorship through the reproducibility of images and the myth of Narcissus. In his later Xerox Actions, such as those documented in “Narcisse” Exercicio de Me Ver (1980) and Untitled (1980), Hudinilson Jr. would lay his naked body on the machine’s glass plate, capturing its fragmented shapes and textures. The interplay between the Xerox machine and the artist’s body produced images that blur the line between representation and abstraction, inviting and refusing intimacy. Hudinilson Jr.’s explorations of the male body push against the heteronormative masculine ideal.

 

Leo Matiz (Colombia, b. 1917 – d. 1998)

A renowned Colombian photojournalist and artist, Leo Matiz was known for capturing the political and cultural landscapes of Latin America with both immediacy and artistry. In his Pérez Jiménez series, taken during the dictatorship of Venezuelan leader Marcos Pérez Jiménez in the 1950s, Matiz documents the theatrical pageantry and underlying tensions of authoritarian rule. His photographs, often staged at official events and public appearances, reveal the contradictions of a regime invested in spectacle—lavish parades, monumental architecture, and curated images of national progress. Yet within these composed scenes, Matiz captures subtle gestures of unease and control, offering a quiet critique of power and its performance. With his sharp eye for composition and narrative, Matiz transforms photojournalism into a form of visual commentary, using the camera not only to record history but to question its staging.

 

Ana Mendieta (Cuba, b. 1948 – d. 1985)

Born in Havana, Ana Mendieta arrived in the US in 1961 as part of the Peter Pan Operation. Through the program run by the US government and Catholic Charities, children were separated from their families and sent to the US as a way of escaping Fidel Castro’s Marxist government. Studying inter media arts with German artist Hans Breder at the University of Iowa, Mendieta quickly developed a practice in which her body, the earth and other organic materials such as blood, fire, feathers and wood served as the subject of photographs, films, and performances. Mendieta often employed her body as subject and as a means of addressing violence against women. In “earth-body” work, Mendieta would press her naked form into various natural materials such as mud, sand or grass, leaving a silhouetted outline. For Mendieta, her earth/body sculptures allowed her what she termed a means of, “becoming one with the earth… and reactivating primeval beliefs.”

 

Mary Miss (USA, b. 1944)

A pioneer of site-specific installation and environmental art, Mary Miss creates works that foreground perception, place, and the viewer’s physical relationship to the landscape. Her project in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, initiated in the late 1990s, transforms the sprawling Queens site—once home to two World’s Fairs—into a living archive of layered histories and ecological systems. Through a series of discrete yet connected sculptural interventions, Miss invites park-goers to engage with the site’s often overlooked narratives, from its industrial past to its shifting shoreline and diverse communities. Using materials such as stainless-steel markers, pathways, and viewing devices, she frames natural and built features to make visible what is typically hidden: environmental data, water flow, and urban infrastructure. The project exemplifies her long-standing commitment to public engagement and environmental awareness, offering a model of how art can activate civic space and deepen our understanding of place.

 

Charlotte Moorman (USA, b. 1933 – d. 1991)

A classically trained cellist turned avant-garde performer, Charlotte Moorman played a pivotal role in expanding the boundaries of music, performance, and feminist expression in the 1960s and ’70s. Her performance of Mieko Shiomi’s Cello Sonata exemplifies her radical approach to sound and embodiment, merging rigorous musicianship with conceptual experimentation. Rooted in the spirit of Fluxus, the work resists traditional musical form, unfolding instead as a score of actions, silences, and chance events. Moorman's interpretation emphasized physicality and presence—her cello not only an instrument, but a prop, a symbol, and an extension of her body. In performing Shiomi’s piece, Moorman activated space and time with intention and humor, often challenging the expectations of her audiences and institutions alike. By fusing visual art, sound, and performance, she helped redefine the role of the performer as an active, interpretive force.

 

Vik Muniz (Brazil, b. 1961)

Vik Muniz is renowned for his innovative use of unconventional materials to create intricate and thought-provoking representations of art and culture and challenge traditional notions of medium and perception. This work is part of his Pictures of Dust series, in which the artist used dust collected from the gallery floor of the Whitney Museum, where Richard Serra’s minimalist sculpture Prop (1968) was exhibited. The source material consists of archival photographs of key minimalist works shown at the museum. By recreating these photographs with dust, an ephemeral and unvalued substance, Muniz juxtaposes the impermanence of his medium against the industrial permanence of Serra's minimalist sculpture. Dust, symbolizing decay and detritus, contrasts sharply with the clean, perfect surfaces often associated with minimalist art. Muniz's process involves a layered visual representation: photographs of dust drawings of photographs of artwork from the museum's archive.

 

​​​​​​​​Claudio Perna (Italy, b. 1938 – Cuba, d. 1997)

Claudio Perna was a Venezuelan-Italian conceptual artist whose work merged photography, geography, and performance to question how knowledge and place are constructed. Active during the rise of conceptualism in Latin America, Perna used the camera not as a tool for aesthetic composition but as a means of recording presence, space, and social transformation. His Fotoinforme series, created primarily in the 1970s, exemplifies this approach. These works combine photographs, hand-drawn maps, annotations, and field notes, creating hybrid documents that blur the line between scientific record and artistic gesture. Perna approached the Fotoinforme as both document and critique—challenging the idea of the photograph as a neutral witness and inserting the artist’s body and consciousness into the image. Much like his contemporaries, Perna was responding to the contradictions of modernity, particularly Venezuela’s rapid urbanization under petrocapitalism. Walking, photographing, and writing became forms of resistance against rigid disciplinary systems. Fotoinforme operates on multiple registers: as a trace of movement, a site of reflection, and a layered commentary on how landscapes are mediated through power, language, and image. Through this series, Perna redefined photography as an active, critical process—one that maps not just terrain, but also ideology.

 

Rosângela Rennó (Brazil, b. 1962)

Rosângela Rennó is a Brazilian artist known for her critical engagement with archival and vernacular photography, often exploring themes of memory, erasure, and the materiality of the image. Her series Insólidos (2014) continues this inquiry through a sculptural approach that emphasizes the photograph as both object and illusion. Composed of six translucent images printed on pure silk organza and suspended vertically within a horizontal frame, each work in the series invites viewers to navigate layers of visibility, opacity, and disappearance. As the viewer shifts position, images merge and dissolve, challenging fixed perception and constructing a fluid, non-hierarchical relationship among forms. Rennó’s use of silk—a delicate, porous material—foregrounds the ephemeral nature of photography and the fragility of what it captures. The title Insólidos, a linguistic invention that suggests both solidity and the uncanny, reflects the paradox at the heart of the work: an image that is at once fleeting and persistent, intimate and abstract. Like much of Rennó’s practice, this series demands a reconsideration of how we see and remember, offering an experience that is less about deciphering a single truth and more about the continuous act of looking.

 

In her series A última foto [The Last Photo] (2006), Rennó stages a quiet yet pointed meditation on the death of analog photography and the layered complexities of image ownership. For the project, she invited several photographers to take a final image of the iconic Christ the Redeemer statue using old cameras from her personal collection. Each photograph is presented as a diptych alongside the camera that produced it—its lens permanently sealed after the shot—turning the device into both artifact and tomb. While the work appears archival, almost archaeological, its conceptual weight lies in the tangled legal authorship of the images. From the sculptor’s heirs to the Catholic Church to the photographers themselves, the question of who “owns” the image is rendered ambiguous, if not absurd. A última foto resists resolution, offering no explanatory text and instead inviting viewers to confront the instability of representation, reproduction, and the photographic trace. By literalizing the “last image,” Rennó marks the end of one era while subtly exposing the unresolved tensions that continue to haunt visual culture.

 

Sophie Rivera (USA, b. 1938 – d. 2021)

Sophie Rivera was a Bronx-based photographer whose work addressed questions of identity, visibility, and representation, particularly within Puerto Rican communities in the United States. In her Double Exposure series from the 1980s, Rivera used superimposed imagery to explore the layered nature of selfhood and memory. Each photograph merges two exposures to create composite representations that disrupt the coherence of traditional portraiture. The result is a visual language that reflects the fragmentation and complexity of personal and cultural identity. Rather than presenting a singular, fixed self, Rivera’s layered portraits evoke a sense of multiplicity—an identity shaped by overlapping histories, relationships, and environments. The technique of double exposure becomes a metaphor for the way memory and experience imprint upon the body and the image. Without relying on spectacle or didactic framing, Rivera’s work invites a slower, more intimate form of looking. Double Exposure insists on the presence of lives often rendered invisible in mainstream narratives, offering instead a portrait of identity as fluid, unstable, and deeply embedded in place and kinship.

 

Lotty Rosenfeld (Chile, b. 1943 – d. 2020)

Lotty Rosenfeld was a Chilean conceptual artist whose work used minimal gestures to challenge political authority and the symbolic control of public space. Her 1985 photograph Palacio de La Moneda documents a key moment from her performance Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (A Mile of Crosses on the Pavement), initiated under the Pinochet dictatorship. In the image, Rosenfeld is captured outside Chile’s presidential palace, intervening in the lines of the street by adding a single strip of white tape to create a cross, transforming a mark of traffic regulation into a sign of rupture and resistance. The photograph stands not only as a record of the action but as a political image. By staging the intervention in front of La Moneda, a site heavily laden with the memory of Chile’s 1973 coup, Rosenfeld underscores the stakes of public space as a terrain of power and its contestation. The image freezes a moment of disruption making visible the possibility of dissent through subtle reconfigurations of the everyday. As with much of Rosenfeld’s work, Palacio de La Moneda reconsiders how meaning is constructed, claimed, and undone in the spaces we move through.

 

Daniela Rossell (Mexico, b. 1973)

Daniela Rossell is a contemporary artist whose Ricas y Famosas series (1994–2001) critically examines the construction of celebrity, identity, and social aspiration through visual culture. In this work, Rossell appropriates and recontextualizes images from popular media—portraits of well-known women symbolizing wealth and status—inviting a reconsideration of how fame and success are represented and consumed. By isolating and reframing these images, she exposes the performative nature of celebrity and the cultural fantasies tied to gender and class. Ricas y Famosas uses repetition and visual fragmentation to destabilize the polished veneer of fame, revealing underlying tensions between visibility and invisibility, empowerment and objectification. Rossell’s approach highlights how images circulate within social and economic systems that shape desire and identity. Through this work, she interrogates the boundaries between public persona and private self, offering a nuanced critique of the media’s role in constructing ideals of wealth and notoriety.

 

Melanie Smith (United Kingdom, b. 1965)

Melanie Smith moved to Mexico City in 1989 where she became a central figure in the city’s artistic community. Spanning installation, video, painting and photography, Smith’s work is centered on the social and anthropological fabric of Mexico City, exploring its properties such as the city’s dense population and topographical diversity. In Urban Views (1997-2006), Smith abstracts cityscapes beneath a translucent layer of acrylic, reflecting her engagement with the visual language of modernism and urban aesthetics. Her technique—layering, sanding, and rubbing down thin coats of enamel—creates blurred, flat surfaces that convey a sense of transience and impermanence within urban space. One of Melanie Smith’s most recognized works is the video piece Spiral City (2002), created in collaboration with cinematographer Rafael Ortega. Filmed from a helicopter over Mexico City, it captures the sprawling grid of the metropolis, evoking both its magnitude and complexity. This work serves as a visual dialogue with Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), drawing connections between the constructed and the natural world. Across her body of work, Smith presents a deeply considered exploration of city life, charting the intersections of urbanization, modernity, and visual expression.

 

Tavares Strachan (The Bahamas, b. 1979)

Tavares Strachan is a multidisciplinary artist whose work engages with history, identity, and representation, often drawing from archival sources to challenge dominant narratives. In his projects incorporating images from Ebony magazine, Strachan explores the complexities of Black visibility and cultural memory within American media. By recontextualizing photographs from this iconic publication, which chronicled African American life and achievements throughout the 20th century, he highlights the layered dynamics of representation, aspiration, and erasure. Strachan’s use of Ebony images interrogates how Black identity has been framed within popular culture and the broader social imagination. His work questions the construction of historical narratives and the selective visibility afforded to Black subjects in mainstream media. Through strategies of appropriation and transformation, Strachan not only honors the significance of these images but also challenges viewers to reconsider the ways visual archives shape collective memory and identity.

 

Milagros de la Torre (Peru, b. 1965)

Milagros de la Torre is a Peruvian artist whose photographic practice critically examines memory, violence, and the remnants of trauma. Her Bulletproof series consists of seemingly innocent, unsuspecting everyday pieces of clothing. Suspended in vacant white spaces, depicted in high detail, these finely crafted garments conceal their real purpose: to protect the wearer from firearms attacks. Emblematic of our times, characterized by increasing militarization, violence and lack of gun control, threat is implicit within the fashion statement. Armored clothing is not only used by politicians or the rich and famous, but also being widely adopted by ordinary citizens in nations plagued by crime or conflict across the globe. Bulletproof features pieces of clothing designed for different styles, age groups, and genders. Each work is life-sized and printed on cotton paper with a similar texture to the fabrics used for their manufacture.

 

Julia Wachtel (USA, b. 1956)

Julia Wachtel emerged at the same time as the Pictures Generation in 1980s New York, and shares many of the same concerns and strategies regarding media appropriation and ironic juxtaposition. In her American Color series from the 1990s onwards, Wachtel combines strips of monochromatic canvases with silkscreened snippets of found images, as a cryptic response to the mass proliferation of media technologies. The photographic subjects, taken with Wachtel’s camera from the television and rendered in four-color process silkscreen on canvas, are portraits primarily of ordinary people confessing their personal stories on popular daytime talk shows, or actors in overwrought moments from daytime soap operas. The works prefigure the onslaught of reality TV and allude to the bearing of American emotion on popular media. The abstracted background is loosely associative of the American strip landscape with its generic corporate architecture and signage and the color choices are equally inspired by this ubiquitous corporate aesthetic. Wachtel achieves the depth of color and sheen in these colors by using an automatic spray gun to build approximately 30 layers of paint.

 

Yeni & Nan (Venezuela, est. 1977)

Jennifer Hackshaw and María Luisa González began working together as a collective called Yeni & Nan in 1977 after meeting at the Cristóbal Rojas art school in Caracas. The duo’s multifaceted work seeks to embody their own identity, specifically in relation to personal and shared space, as well as natural and psychological changes of the human form. By utilizing their own bodies as medium, they bring to light larger questions regarding the female figure and concurrently emphasize their environmental awareness. The theme of birth and origin is a constant in their work, conceived as a cycle that begins before birth and after it. The performance Transfiguración elemento tierra took place in 1983, at Sala Mendoza in Caracas. The artists, their faces covered in mud, installed two monitors that displayed in real time the mud drying; neither of them blinked during the extended process. To prepare for the action, Yeni & Nan trained in a form of conscious meditation called Tratak, which involves staring at a focal point. In front of the monitors, they installed two structures on which they performed different actions, such as lying down and smearing mud on each other's bodies. Mud, here, acts as an analogy for the relationships between skin and body; between geography, landscape, and body; and between earth and body.

 

Facundo de Zuviría (Argentina, b. 1954)

Facundo de Zuviría is an Argentine photographer whose work reflects a deep engagement with the textures and rhythms of urban life. His 1995 photograph Peatones en la Recova del Bajo Buenos Aires captures a moment in one of Buenos Aires’ bustling commercial arcades, focusing on the anonymous flow of pedestrians within this architectural setting. Through a clear, observational approach, de Zuviría emphasizes the everyday movements and social exchanges that animate the city’s public spaces. The image functions as both a document and a quiet meditation on urban experience, revealing how individual presence and collective passage shape the character of the city. By isolating this scene of transit and interaction, de Zuviría invites viewers to reconsider the significance of ordinary moments and the layered narratives embedded in the city’s physical and social landscape.