Alinka Echeverria
Referring to both her personal journey, as well as the quest of the people in her work, of Mexican-British artist Alinka Echeverría examines 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 photographic sequence which launched Echeverría’s career is The Road to Tepeyac which 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. Echeverría deconstructs the philosophical, psychological and anthropological relationship between an invisible presence and its materialized expression.
More recently, her body of work M-Theory presents a poetic interpretation of South Africa’s struggle against Apartheid. Through photographic prints of the fingerprints of prominent figures of the struggle, such as Nelson Mandela and Deputy Chief Justice Moseneke, the artist distills the complex question of how the epidermis of man, became a determining factor in his life within a system of racial oppression. Consistently intrigued by the divergent modalities of visibility within representation, Echeverría plays with the macro and micro of personal biography versus official history, through the metaphor of the fingerprint as …
Referring to both her personal journey, as well as the quest of the people in her work, of Mexican-British artist Alinka Echeverría examines 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 photographic sequence which launched Echeverría’s career is The Road to Tepeyac which 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. Echeverría deconstructs the philosophical, psychological and anthropological relationship between an invisible presence and its materialized expression.
More recently, her body of work M-Theory presents a poetic interpretation of South Africa’s struggle against Apartheid. Through photographic prints of the fingerprints of prominent figures of the struggle, such as Nelson Mandela and Deputy Chief Justice Moseneke, the artist distills the complex question of how the epidermis of man, became a determining factor in his life within a system of racial oppression. Consistently intrigued by the divergent modalities of visibility within representation, 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 many of Echeverría’s works, the series 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.
Her work has been widely exhibited at international venues, including solo exhibitions at Johannesburg Art Gallery in South Africa, The California Museum of Photography in Riverside CA, French Institute of Latin America in Mexico City, and Centro Cultural Recoletas in Buenos Aires. She has also participated in group exhibitions at institutions such as Maison Europeenne de la Photographie in Paris, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Moscow Photobiennale.
Courtesy of Gazelli Art House
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
The Wittliff Collections, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX
Fundación Casa Medina Sidonia, Cádiz, Spain
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris France
Lehigh University Art Galleries, Bethlehem, PA
FOLI Museo de la Fotografía de Lima, Lima, Peru
Laleh June Galerie, Basel, Switzerland
Gazelli Art House, London, UK
