Contemporary Art Laboratory in Lima
March 5, 2026
Peru
Colorismos. Opening: March 5, 2026, 7pm. Location: proyectoamil, Lima.
proyectoamil, along with artists Martin Gustavsson and Rodrigo Gómez Olivos, presents HACIENDO CONTEXTO IX: Colorismos, the ninth edition of its collaborative contemporary art laboratory. Opening March 5, 2026, at proyectoamil in Barranco, Lima, the exhibition brings together Fabiola Adama, Juan Pablo Bernuy, Juan Carlos Catacora Gutarra, Ximena Ferrer Pizarro, Andre Daza, Melen, Sergio Pacheco, Walther Sanchez, and Kinshiro Shimura.
As children, many of us encountered boxes of colored crayons that included a shade labeled “skin color.” Far from neutral, this designation operated as an early lesson in representation: a single hue stood in for “the human,” while other bodies were rendered deviation or excess. Such chromatic hierarchies have long structured both racial imaginaries and aesthetic canons.
In Peru, since the sixteenth century, visual culture has participated in the production and legitimation of social stratification. Colonial image regimes not only reflected racial classifications but naturalized them, embedding distinctions of color into religious iconography, portraiture, and systems of value. Color became both material and metaphor—an index of difference and a mechanism of power.
Colorismos examines how these histories persist within contemporary visual culture. Through painting, installation, and research-based practices, the participating artists interrogate the moral, political, and symbolic weight attributed to color. Does color still carry an ethical charge? How do aesthetic traditions continue to authorize structures of exclusion? And what forms of subjectivity become possible when chromatic hierarchies are unsettled?
The project further extends this inquiry beyond the human. The same logic that naturalized hierarchies among bodies has shaped humanity’s extractive relationship to the more-than-human world. In the context of the Anthropocene, color emerges as a metaphor for planetary entanglement: no longer a boundary, but a field of interdependence.
Colorismos asks whether security must rely on separation and domination, or whether new forms of relational identity—across bodies, histories, and ecologies—can be imagined.
