Join artist Rebeca Romero for an evening of conversation about her newly commissioned work on show in ‘Trinta/Treinta/Thirty Years of the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America’.

The artist will offer personal insights into her work, expanding on the experience of working on the commission in response to ESCALA and her fascinating approach to using a range of technologies and data collection in museum archives. It is a great opportunity to find out more about creative approaches to decolonising museum archives, intervening in digital archives as a history-making technique, and the role of speculation in rethinking local histories marked by a colonial past.

Moderated by curators Dr Sarah Demelo and Gisselle Giron

The talk will be followed by Q&A.

We are then all invited to a “jarana” (party in Spanish) next door to Art Exchange, in 5N.151, co-organised by the Latin American Society!

About Rebeca Romero

Rebeca Romero is a multidisciplinary artist born in Peru and based in London.  Through a range of media that includes sculpture, ceramics, textiles, sound, performance and video, she explores concepts of diasporic identity, truth, fiction, and their relationship to the digital age. Often combining Pre-Columbian iconography with advanced scanning and printing technologies and materials ranging from clay to plastic, her works swing between the past and an alternate future. Examining the story-telling potential of artefacts, Rebeca looks into the intervention of the digital archive as a history-making technique. With a focus on new materialities, processes of production and collaboration between artist and machine, her work seeks to question ideas and practices of representation, appropriation and authorship. The recent inclusion of AI image generators into her work proposes a further re-understanding of hegemonic notions of intelligence, technology and knowledge.

Rebeca received an MFA in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College, University of London (2020), and has exhibited internationally, with solo and group shows in London, Turin, Vienna, Lisbon, Brussels, Cyprus and Lima. She was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries Award (UK, 2021) and most recently, received the OGR Award (IT, 2023), awarded to artists that effectively convey complex relationships between art, technology and innovation, with a particular focus on the digital.  Her work is featured in the book ‘Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now’ (2023) by Phaidon.

Image courtesy of the artist.