Sandra Gamarra Heshiki

The Peruvian artist Sandra Gamarra, represents Spain at the Venice Biennale. It is the first time in 60 editions that an artist not born in Spain has done so. Her project, 'Pinacoteca migrante', questions colonial narratives and historical modes of representation. The project is curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio, with a long career in Latin American art as artistic director of the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (Malba) or as curator of the Chile pavilion at the 2018 Biennial.

The Spanish pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale thus becomes a space to reread the Spanish pictorial heritage (Murillo, Zurbarán or even Velázquez) and make silenced cultures visible. Gamarra, who was already at the 2009 Venice Biennale in the pavilion of the Italian-Latin American Institute, takes as a starting point paintings, from the time of the Empire to the Enlightenment, in which reference is made to the territories that were part of Spain, but they carry with them a “monolithic notion that was based on the destruction of other forms of social organization.” Through six rooms or sections she will explore the classic genres of the arts: engraving, portrait, landscape... with interventions and reinterpretations that will analyze the biased representations between colonizers and colonized, in addition to offering a historical context that is linked to the present.

The rooms that make up Pinacoteca migrante are titled: Tierra Virgen, about paintings of Spanish landscapes, but also from Latin America, the Philippines and North Africa; Cabinet of Extinction, which links colonialism with extractivism; Cabinet of Illustrated Racism, a story about how anthropology and science were used as a tool of racial discrimination; Mestizo masks, on the portrait of settlers; Altarpiece of Dying Nature, which will relate the still life to the construction of opulence and treasures; and Migrant Garden, which will recreate monuments about the conquest that are located in the former colonies. In all of them he will combine the plastic arts with quotes from ecofeminist writers or thinkers; modifications of facsimiles of illustrations from real archives or representations of alien or invasive plants, alluding to migration.

Sandra Gamarra Heshiki (b. 1972, Lima) uses painting figuratively to question art and its mechanisms of representation, exhibition and commercialisation. Based on appropriation, her work functions as a mirror that displaces exhibition formats, alters the circuit of images, subverts the ownership of culture, as well as the narrative between the art object and the spectator. Within this field of research, the legacy of her country of origin generates a syncretic gaze where pre-Columbian, colonial and Western cultures collide. Gamarra Heshiki has participated at the 11th Berlin Biennale; the 29th São Paulo Biennale; Mundus Novus, IILA Pavilion; 53rd Venice Biennale; and the 11th Cuenca Biennale. She has works in collections such as the MNCARS - Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; MACBA, Barcelona; Tate Modern, London; Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin; MoMA, New York; MALI, Lima; MAR, Rio de Janeiro, among others. She lives and works between Lima and Madrid.

Agustín Pérez Rubio (b. 1972, Valencia) is an historian, professor and curator with extensive experience in curatorial work in museums and institutions in Latin America and Europe. He was curator —together with María Berríos, Lisette Lagnado and Renata Cervetto— of the 11th Berlin Biennale (2018-20). Prior to that, he was curator of the Chilean Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019); Artistic Director of MALBA (Buenos Aires, 2014-18); Chief Curator and Director of MUSAC (León, 2003-13). He was a member of the Board of the Istanbul Biennial (2017-22) and is actively continuing his work on the Board of CIMAM (2016-present). In recent years he has set out to rethink decoloniality, both in the field of museums and in the field of sex-disident practices based on feminist and queer theory. He has been distinguished as a visiting professor at the Institut für Kunst im Kontext (Universität der Künste Berlin, 2019-20) and at other international universities.

Commissioner: AECID (Spanish Agency for lnternational Development Cooperation)
AC/E (Acción Cultural Española)

Curator: Agustin Perez Rubio