Fátima Rodrigo Gonzales is a multidisciplinary artist working with textiles, installation, video and drawing.
2023 Biennial Year Find out more
Taking up elements from vernacular celebrations and showbusiness, she has developed a particular language that questions the power regimes naturalised by artistic modernity. She was recently part of the Art Explora and Cite des Arts Residency Program, in Paris the Bienal Saco and Atelier Mondial Residency Program in Basel,2022.
Her recent solo shows include: Plató América, in collaboration with Jaime Oliver, MALI, Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI); Fiesta en America, ICPNA, Lima; UNAP, Many Studios, Glasgow International Festival, Glasgow, 2016. She has taken part in numerous group shows, most notably: 22 Biennale of Sydney, Nirin, 2020; Ars Electronica 2020; Weavers of The Coluds, Fashion and Textile Museum, London; El Desastre es para siempre, Museum of The City of Queretaro, Mexico. Her work has been published in:77 Peruvian Contemporary Artists (2017) and Tomorrow: Themes in Contemporary Latin American Abstraction (upcoming).
Liverpool Biennial 2023
‘Holograms’ and ‘Contradanza’
In this installation, both ‘Holograms’ and ‘Contradanza’ draw upon how fashion photography often copies and extracts from the aesthetics and traditional dress of Indigenous people and cultures for commercial purposes.
In these types of photographs, people are portrayed as subjects with no identity, reduced to their costumes that become detached from their original purpose or meaning through repetitive postures and gestures. Through the photographer’s lens, Andean and other Indigenous bodies become exotic commodities for an international market, enabling hierarchies that reproduce the colonial idea of a “civilised us” constructed in opposition to the “Indigenous others”.
Rodrigo Gonzales’ work is a critique of this ongoing colonial extraction, which simplifies and synthesises complex traditions and celebrations into decorative settings. Using the same patterns and
In this installation, both ‘Holograms’ and ‘Contradanza’ draw upon how fashion photography often copies and extracts from the aesthetics and traditional dress of Indigenous people and cultures for commercial purposes. In these types of photographs, people are portrayed as subjects with no identity, reduced to their costumes that become detached from their original purpose or meaning through repetitive postures and gestures. Through the photographer’s lens, Andean and other Indigenous bodies become exotic commodities for an international market, enabling hierarchies that reproduce the colonial idea of a “civilised us” constructed in opposition to the “Indigenous others”. Rodrigo Gonzales’ work is a critique of this ongoing colonial extraction, which simplifies and synthesises complex traditions and celebrations into decorative settings. Using the same patterns and symbols, often lost in the background of these staged photographs, she creates new abstract compositions which reclaim the existence, meaning and essence of traditional Andean celebrations. In ‘Holograms’, the eyes of traditional masks, geometric elements from garments, and body parts lifted from fashion magazines and other source imagery, are reproduced to create precious and almost sacred hanging sculptures. The title ‘Contradanza’ refers to a traditional dance that, at its origin, mocked the courtly dances of the Spanish colonizers. In Peru, the dance came to be associated with the way local servants perceived their Spanish masters, resulting in a parodic representation of the way they acted during their celebrations and how they imposed them on Peruvian territory. Showing at Tate Liverpool + RIBA North
‘Holograms’ and ‘Contradanza’
Showing at Tate Liverpool + RIBA North
Monday to Sunday 10.00am-5:50pm-
Fátima Rodrigo Gonzales, ‘Holograms’ and ‘Contradanza’ 2021. Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Tate Liverpool. Courtesy of Liverpool Biennial. Photography by Stuart Whipps
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Fátima Rodrigo Gonzales, ‘Contradanza’, 2023. Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Tate Liverpool. Courtesy of Liverpool Biennial. Photography by Mark McNulty
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Fátima Rodrigo Gonzales, ‘Holograms’ and ‘Contradanza’ 2021. Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Tate Liverpool. Courtesy of Liverpool Biennial. Photography by Stuart Whipps
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Fátima Rodrigo Gonzales, ‘Holograms’ and ‘Contradanza’ 2021. Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Tate Liverpool. Courtesy of Liverpool Biennial. Photography by Stuart Whipps
