Sandra Gamarra Heshiki: Pinacoteca Migrante / Migrant Art Gallery

Curator: Agustín Pérez Rubio.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation of Spain, through the Spanish Agency for International Development and Cooperation (AECID), in collaboration with Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), presents further details of the Pinacoteca Migrante / Migrant Art Gallery, developed by Sandra Gamarra Heshiki for the Spanish Pavilion in the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale 2024. As the first migrant artist chosen to represent Spain, Gamarra Heshiki uses the museum as the main axis of the project as a narrator of great stories, whose methods of representation have been assumed to be “universal”.

Gamarra Heshiki will transform the Spanish Pavilion into a historic gallery of Western art where the notion of “migration”, in its many facets, will be the protagonist. The Western concept of the art gallery, which was exported to the former colonies, is inverted, exposing a series of historically silenced narratives. Pinacoteca Migrante / Migrant Art Gallery responds to accessibility, diversity and sustainability within an institutional framework and inserts contemporary contexts in relation to racism, migration or extractivism. The protagonists are the migrants, both human and living organisms, plants and raw materials that often made the round trip by force.

Combining sociology, politics, art history and biology in her extensive research, the artist will exhibit a series of new works whose starting point are key paintings from Spanish art collections and museums. Gamarra Heshiki’s works interfere with the lack of decolonial narratives in museums and will analyze the biased representations between colonizers and colonized. The first five rooms—Virgin Land, Cabinet of Extinction, Miscegenation Masks, Cabinet of Enlightened Racism and Dying Life Altarpiece—will feature different themes from classical painting traditions such as landscape, still life, scientific illustration, and portraiture, among others, viewing them as tools with political agendas that promote monolithic constructions of nation states. The narrative of the project elaborates a continuous cycle between construction and deterioration, demonstrated in the appearance of the paintings as sketches, finished works or in a state of permanent restoration, as a metaphor both for the impossibility of fixing the history and as a way of showing the open colonial wound.

The central courtyard space of the Spanish Pavilion will be occupied by the Migrant Garden, in which Gamarra Heshiki will present painted copies of twelve monuments that are not in Spain, but which have symbolic power in the history of the former colonies. The courtyard also includes examples of invasive plants that endanger ecosystems and put local species at risk of extinction, itself a reference to the colonial history of humanity that has put traditional ways of living at risk of extinction across the world. Additionally, at a time when monuments are removed, destroyed, or vandalized, this inner courtyard acts as a place of symbolic restitution, proposing a new ways of institutional framework.

Pinacoteca Migrante / Migrant Art Gallery aims to provide a model that updates the protocols of accessibility, diversity, and sustainability of our institutions, dismantling the structures that perpetuate the hegemonic hierarchies of colonialism.

About publication
A companion 240-pages, bilingual (English- Spanish) publication edited by Agustín Pérez Rubio will be published by AECID and distributed internationally by Walther König Books, designed by Estudio Eugenio Simó with Antoine Henry Jonquères as editorial advisor and Laoficina as editorial coordinator. The work will include texts by Françoise Vergès, Yayo Herrero, Gabriela Wiener, Yeison F. García López, Neferti X. M. Tadiar and María Berríos, as well as a conversation between the artist, the curator and Esther Gabara. In addition, the Spanish Pavilion will have a printed guide in three languages with the texts and information of the project.

​The official opening of the Spanish Pavilion in Venice is  Friday April 19 at 12:15pm. 

For more information and to access the 3D digital tour of the pavilion (starting April 26) visit here.

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