Solaris

For his third solo exhibition at the gallery, Oscar Santillán will present one his largest installations Solaris, a series of 35 photographs of the Atacama Desert, taken with a photographic lens made from its melted sand.

 

Ten years ago, Santillán travelled through the Atacama, one of the driest and oldest on Earth, whilst reading Stanislaw Lem's 'Solaris', the SF classic in which the protagonist is not a human but the thinking ocean of an alien planet. This trip became the seed of Antimundo, the ongoing multidisciplinary project that his practice is rooted in today, which envisions connections between Andean forms of indigenous knowledge and emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and 3D modelling, to explore what lies beyond the known and prescriptive Western worldview. Alongside Solaris, the exhibition will include new sculptural and multimedia works from the Antimundo series.

 

Santillán will represent Ecuador at the upcoming 61st Venice Biennale, Italy.