ALINKA ECHEVERRIA

Following the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, South Searching encompasses four separate bodies of work developed over the past four years of Echeverría’s career, but seen together for the very first time in a gallery setting.

Her research engages debates of alternative modernities, through an observation of how our cultural perspective has influenced the way certain political movements and anthropological phenomena are represented and remembered, as well as the relationship between knowledge and belief. The exhibition refers to both the personal journey of the artist and the quest of the people in her work - individually and collectively.

Consistently intrigued by the divergent modalities of visibility within representation, Echeverría combines two approaches in her work- the subtle, calculated yet abstract nature of fine art photography on the one hand, and raw documentary imagery captured on the other.

The exhibition opens with the her most recent body of work, presenting a poetic interpretation of South Africa’s struggle against apartheid, through the personal stories of twenty-one prominent figures of the struggle from Nelson Mandela to Eddie Daniels. Using a camera-less photographic technique, the artist distils the complex question of how the epidermis of man, became a determining factor in his life within a system of racial oppression. Echeverría plays with the macro and micro of personal biography versus official history through the metaphor of the fingerprint as the ultimate mode of identification. “Like the forgotten veterans of many liberation movements, the fingerprints are nameless, but the identity is undeniable - individual, coded and concealing the identity of a person with intellect, ideals and perseverance that eventually brought the end of apartheid in South Africa.” Alinka Echeverría

The series touches upon the associations made between the presence of an individual - their outreach, their power, their influence over another - and society. The removal of the individual’s personal data from the imagery questions the extent to which we own our identities. Echeverría aspires to transcend learned categories such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality, to reimagine the individual as a textured landscape of physical, social and spiritual possibilities. Questioning the representation of a persona, the fingerprints create an entity of their own, abstracted through their substantial scale, visually alluding to landscape aerial views.

In Becoming South Sudan, Echeverría turns to a different form of representation by exploring the act of wearing as a mode of becoming, self-determination and self-reflection. Through powerful, sometimes confrontational portraits, Echeverría captures the gaze of individuals at a pivotal time in 2011, when the Republic of South Sudan finally gained Independence after decades of war. Interested in the historical moment of the birth of a country, the artist explored the representational constructs of what it meant to suddenly become a Nation State and unite sixty-nine tribes under a national ethos.

A selection of works from the artist’s acclaimed body of work, The Road to Tepeyac and a complimenting audio work And So It Was Told, also displayed on the first floor of the gallery, captures devout pilgrims carrying their personal image of the Virgin of Guadalupe during the annual pilgrimage to Tepeyac Hill in Mexico City, the site of her miraculous apparition.* This photographic sequence which launched Echeverría’s career, deconstructs the philosophical, psychological and anthropological relationship between an invisible presence and its materialized expression.

In its inaugural display, the Deep Blindness series examines both physical and metaphoric blindness in contemporary society. Also the conceptual framework for Echeverria’s most recent body of work, where the artist addresses our wilful denial, to ‘see’ beyond fixed ideas of meaning based on our experience, education and culturally cultivated symbols. Using a combination of different mediums from sculptural, photographic representations to video and audio works, this long term project explores the liabilities of gaze and the connection between seeing and knowing. Displayed on the upper floor of the gallery, Ixiptla, a purposefully flattened photographic braille sculpture describing the apparition of the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, questions the role of vision in systems of belief, the perception of image, and how it is embedded in language and constructed codes of communication.