Opening: Friday, November 21th, 7 p.m
In collaboration with BIENALSUR, the exhibition Behind the Eyes, curated by Katharina Klang (DEU) and Victoria Tarak (DEU), explores the space that unfolds when we close our eyes, when the outside world spins and projects itself inward. What constitutes our inner life, and how does our perception shift within it? The exhibition invites viewers to engage with these interior spaces–spaces of process and imagination. Together with the participating artists, we aim to weave a multi-perspective network exploring the potential for social empowerment rooted in these inner realms.
The exhibition presents an encounter between interiority and exteriority, tracing both physical and immaterial gestures that the self inscribes into society. A particular focus is placed on memory and its capacity to overlay space and time, conjuring real and imaginary landscapes and rethinking conceptions of resistance and becoming. In painting, photography, video, archival material, and voice the works unfold at the intersection of the intimate and the political and act as bridges where personal and collective experience merge into one another.
Within this framework, the selected works reflect on historical and biographical ruptures and absences. By turning our gaze inward–toward the spaces behind closed eyes–the exhibition proposes an alternative, decentralized cartography of the self, one that resonates with the decentralized structure of BIENALSUR itself. Here, cartography emerges not as a tool of measurement, but as an aesthetic and political practice inviting us to rethink how we perceive–within and beyond the visible.
South America Coordination: Cristina Sommer (ARG/DEU)