Reimagining the Image: Alinka Echeverría

Join Mexican, London-based photographer and ICP alum Alinka Echeverría for an evening presentation of her most recent projects followed by a conversation with ICP consulting curator Maya Benton.

Echeverría will present her most recent work, Nicephora, a four-year project based on her BMW Art and Culture Residency at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce where she deployed a rigorous, research-based approach to explore the male and colonial gaze from the inception of the photographic medium. Using interdisciplinary methods that include collages, three dimensional renderings and sculptural work, immersive sound installation, photography, assemblage, and moving image works, Echeverría reflects on how constructed images of women have been carried through time by way of visual codes and early photographic printing techniques.

Reimagining the Image

This series examines film, photography, and new media from the artist’s perspective. Taking lens-based work as a starting point, Reimagining the Image invites in imagemakers who pose new questions about the social function of photography, use alternative and emerging practices, and ask critical questions about the form.

Bios

Alinka Echeverría (b. Mexico City, 1981) is a Mexican, London-based artist working across multiple disciplines including film and photography. Her background in anthropology and extensive field experience in Africa play a central role in her contemporary, critical approach to visual representation. Echeverría holds an MA in social anthropology and development from the University of Edinburgh (2004). She spent several years working in HIV prevention projects in East Africa, as an educator and project leader for NGOs that utilized media and theater, before pursuing a postgraduate degree in photography from the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York (2008).

Her acclaimed and widely exhibited photography and sound projects include The Road to Tepeyac (2010), consisting of 125 images of devout Mexican pilgrims carrying their personal image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the anniversary of her apparition in 1531; Deep Blindness (2013–Present), combining an audio work in Nahuatl, the dying language of the Aztec civilization, with flattened Braille panels that are denied their function; and Nicephora (2015-Present) from which the exhibition Alinka Echeverría: Fieldnotes is drawn. Echeverría was awarded the HSBC Prize for Photography (2011), named Photographer of the Year by the Lucie Awards (2012), awarded BMW’s Art & Culture Residency at the Nicéphore Niépce Museum (2015), nominated for the Prix Pictet (2013), selected for FOAM Museum’s Talent award (2017) and the Prix Elysée (2018-2020), and has been recognized by many of Europe’s leading photography awards and residencies. Her work has been widely exhibited at international venues.

Maya Benton is a consulting curator at the International Center of Photography in New York. She has organized numerous international traveling exhibitions, lectures widely, and is a frequent contributor to magazines and museum catalogs where she writes about photography, museums, and material culture.

Benton is currently organizing a traveling exhibition of photographer and filmmaker Gillian Laub’s contemporary images of racial segregation in the American South, Southern Rites. Her next book will be an anthology of seminal texts on Jews and Photography. She is a graduate of Brown University, Harvard University and the Courtauld Institute of Art.