Naomi Gamarra - Liste Art Fair 2024

CRISIS Gallery ///// Booth 6

Naomi Gamarra (Geneva, 1999) is an artist of Bolivian and Peruvian descent. Her work explores the transmission of cultural heritage and the issues related to her personal experience of migration, intra-family and collective memory. By examining the historical questions related to colonization in these two regions of Latin America, Gamarra takes interest in the objects, symbols, myths, or syncretic representations that emerge from this cultural and political clash. Her work focuses on re-interpretation, telling the story of the journey between identity, cultural hybridization, and power struggles between the traditional and the modern at the heart of a capitalist globalized world.

For her presentation at LISTE, she has produced a new body of work that combines diverse techniques and materials, such as wood, metal and ceramic. Taking inspiration of the Andean Baroque, she explores the forms of hybridization and the grotesque sculpted in the colonial architecture that can be seen in the near surroundings of the Titicaca Lake, which is located in the borders between Peru and Bolivia. The style combines Christian religious icons with ornamental elements typical of indigenous culture, such as the appearance of local flora and fauna that evoke anthropomorphic gods. The construction of religious architecture was decisive in consolidating a discourse and a hegemonic imaginary, but it was also the means by which a certain resistance of pre-Hispanic beliefs was revealed. As the ornamentation of the facades of the colonial buildings was carried out mainly by indigenous or mestizos trained as artisans, they saw in the representation a space for struggle.