Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra (b. 1967, Viña del Mar, Chile) combines transnational and Indigenous perspectives in her multidisciplinary artistic approach. Her oeuvre, which primarily comprises drawing and painting, as well as video and performance, encompasses complex events, stories, rituals, and beliefs rooted in her upbringing in Chile as well as in her many years of living in Germany.
The first institutional survey exhibition of the artist in Europe, “Soy Energía” is dedicated to her experimental practice and focuses on her spatial, energetic, and global thinking. The multi-perspectivity of Vásquez de la Horra’s work is the starting point for an encounter with her spiritual cosmos, which reconciles human and nature. Her commitment to self-determination and to women’s and human rights is honoured and contextualised. Experiences of persecution, oppression, and migration play an essential role. Vásquez de la Horra is developing her own exhibition practice, based on working with organic materials, extending scenographic approaches into space, and conveying touching existential experiences.
Vásquez de la Horra made her first series of works during the Pinochet regime, from the mid-1980s to the 1990s, focusing on the body and its worldly embedding through signs, fragments, and language. She creates drawings of fabulous hybrid creatures with human, animal, and plant features, revealing the incompatibility of history and morality. These works, soaked in beeswax, a technique she has been using since 1997, are woven into experimental hangings to create multi-perspectival stories and spatial installations. In parallel, she created video performances during her early years in Europe, now presented for the first time, where she processed not only biographical events but also historically significant ones, around themes such as loneliness, separation, and racism. This exhibition brings the artist’s work, with its rich historical dimensions, into contact with its new development in the present day.
Curated by Jana Baumann with Marlene Mützel.
