Hannah Traore Gallery is pleased to present new work by the photographer and visual artist Camila Falquez at NADA Miami. Falquez’s solo presentation was one of eight chosen to be featured in Curated Spotlight, a special section at NADA sponsored by TD Bank and curated by Jenée-Daria Strand, Assistant Curator at Public Art Fund.
Compiling unreleased photographs from various series, this chorus of portraits emanates with the light found in individuals who—as the gender-non-conforming poet and performer Alok Menon once characterized Falquez’s subjects—“Manifest the Impossible.” Cloaked with raw silk dyed in brilliant colors, Falquez transforms the symbol of draped fabric in Western historical painting into a new visual language, liberating, expanding, and re-framing notions of power and beauty in art history. Through her research, Falquez explores how fabric in European painting was used as an emblem of wealth, colonial imperialism, and Catholicism. Offering a fresh interpretation of the material, Falquez reimagines fabric as a tool used to reclaim ancestral history for each of her portrait’s subjects. Once framed with fabric, people with textured voices, bodies, and circumstances are transported into a new center and plane; these are guardians of a world that exists all around us but must be illuminated through platform, celebration, participation, and solidarity.
These photographs are gathered from four of Falquez’s most ambitious ongoing bodies of work. Compañera (2023), is an unreleased portrait-based installation featuring photography, protest art, and a video installation made in the framework of the creation, development, and proposal of the first bill protecting trans and non-binary people in Colombia. Being (2018-2023), is a visual manifesto that seeks to redefine and reclaim monumental pedestals, transforming ideas of power and beauty in order to share stories of survival and liberation overlooked by colonial narratives. Arewa (2021-2023) is a portrait project following the intimate relationship between Falquez and Arewa Basit, a trans performer and activist based in New York City. In this collaboration, Falquez explores the physicality of transness and the dimensional act of growing into and becoming oneself. Lastly, the presentation debuts a portrait from a recent series for The Global Alliance of the Territories that honors Indigenous leaders from around the world. Each image asserts that “la defensa de la madre tierra es la defensa de la humanidad” (the defense of mother earth is the defense of humanity).
