Our Bodies Have Been Bridges

Autograph is developing a new group exhibition exploring the intersections of feminism, ancestry and indigeneity. Opening in Autumn 2026, Our Bodies Have Been Bridges brings together an intergenerational conversation through feminist diasporic practices, asking how personal and collective histories are inscribed on the body and how the body can act as both testimony and witness.

Featuring the influential work of Laura Aguilar, whose practice centred on themes of identity. Aguilar’s work challenged cultural representations of Chicana and lesbian identities, confronting the politics of beauty and the ways bodies inhabit space and social imagination. Through these staged images, she transformed perceptions of the body into sites of resistance, agency and affirmation, asserting the power of self-definition. Aguilar’s work continues to influence contemporary conversations around queerness and intersecting identities in photography.

Exploring the branching paths of tracing lost origins, Tarrah Krajnak’s El Jardín de Senderos que se Bifurcan navigates the intersection of personal and collective history. Born in Lima, Peru in 1979 Krajnak was orphaned from her Indigenous biological family as an infant, displaced through adoption and raised in the American Midwest. With few physical records of her past, her work foregrounds absence and fragmentation. Drawing on images from vintage Peruvian magazines and staged reenactments including a return to the orphanage where she was born, Krajnak inhabits her fractured lineage, asserting memory and identity where history has left gaps.

Whereas in Koyoltzintli's series Meda she asks, “How do you think your oldest ancestors would touch this land?”. Raised within the Indigenous cultures of the Americas, she reflects on women’s ancestral relationships to the land exploring how the body remembers, listens and belong. Photographed across the landscapes of New Mexico and her homelands of Ecuador, the femme body is an active participant – lying, pressing and folding itself into the natural formations. These encounters evoke the otherworldly presence of ‘Sky Women’ origin stories passed down through generations of culture depicting figures suspended between the Earth and the cosmos..

Across these artists’ practices, the exhibition examines how ancestral knowledge and intersectional feminist thought converge. Our Bodies Have Been Bridges demonstrates how feminist perspectives from the Global South – shaped outside Eurocentric frameworks – affirm bodies and memory as active, generative forces. Rooted in maternal lineages and gendered politics, these practices are inseparable from political and cultural realities.