Our Bodies Have Been Bridges

A major new exhibition bringing together three feminist artists from across the Americas whose work centres the body. In distinct ways, each use their body to bridge personal and collective memory, indigenous knowledge and relationships to land.

Across 65 works made over three decades, Laura Aguilar, Tarrah Krajnak and Koyoltzintli use photography to claim presence and resist fixed ideas of who can be seen, and how. In Our Bodies Have Been Bridges portraiture, the archive and land underpin the artists’ works. For Laura Aguilar, her self-portraits place her queer body in the landscapes of the American Southwest, bringing forward a body rarely seen in dominant photographic histories. By continually turning the camera on herself, Aguilar resists erasure and asserts the right to take up space.

Born in Lima in 1979 and adopted by a white working-class American family, Tarrah Krajnak explores the gaps in her personal history against the backdrop of Peru’s political upheaval. By placing herself in dialogue with archival photographs, she imagines a past that remains fragmented and unresolved.

Koyoltzintli reflects on how Indigenous origin stories and cultural traditions sustain connection across generations. For her, the land holds living relations between memory, ceremony and ancestry.

When entering the exhibition, feminisms emerge as a way to negotiate ideas of belonging and power. Drawn from Elizabeth Acevedo’s poem Afro-Latina, the exhibition title Our Bodies Have Been Bridges reiterates the possibility of connection without erasing difference. Each artist asserts their right to appear in their full complexity.

Together their work forms an intergenerational conversation about how the past is carried through the body. Photography becomes an act of resistance – insisting that the politics of the body cannot be separated from the politics of the image.