The Armory Show
New York City, USA - Sept. 4/7, 2025
Kukuli Velarde is a Peruvian-American artist whose work explores the consequences of colonization in contemporary Latin American culture. Her practice constitutes a visual investigation into aesthetics, cultural survival, and inheritance. With a focus on Latin American history, particularly that of Peru, Velarde works with the conviction that its complexity and richness possess universal resonance. Her practice is, at the same time, an act of cultural and aesthetic resistance: through ceramics, she reclaims pre-Columbian techniques and visual languages to articulate a contemporary discourse that questions the persistence of coloniality. Her works move between the intimate and the collective, between the personal and the historical, challenging dominant narratives and recovering marginalized memories.
Corpus: Reinterprets the festivity of Corpus Christi in Cusco, where Catholic processional images conceal ancestral entities. Velarde creates sculptures that, under a baroque appearance, reveal living pre-Hispanic identities, challenging centuries of oppression and homogenization. Corpus denounces how colonization imposed an alien aesthetic canon, while at the same time celebrating the persistence of indigenous subjectivities that still today demand dignity, presence, and recognition.
Illapa: Inspired by the history of the looting, trafficking, and dispersion of indigenous human remains, reduced to scientific specimens or anthropological curiosities, this series summons the ancestors stripped of their sacredness and restores them as material and spiritual presences. Velarde directly confronts the colonial violence that transformed bodies into commodities and the construction of racial hierarchies that, from the invention of skin color theories to the present day, have determined who is considered fully human. Illapa denounces the continuity of this structural racism, while at the same time restoring voice and dignity to the Illapas—Inca mummies understood as beings with power—rescuing them from oblivion and reinstating them in collective memory as witnesses of a historical trauma that remains alive.
A mi vida: Deeply intimate in character, this series is dedicated to her daughter Vida. The sculptures, which bear her infant features, transcend the biographical to become a reflection on separation (whether natural or forced) and on the fragility of affective bonds in contexts of migration and violence. A mi vida is both a gesture of maternal love and a denunciation of the separations imposed on migrant children in detention centers, deprived of affection, roots, and security.
Kukuli Velarde’s work confronts us with historical memory and its fractures, with the pain of loss, and with the extraordinary strength of cultural resistance. Her practice transforms the body (the first territory and first home) into both witness and protagonist of history, opening a space of aesthetic resistance that invites us to imagine possible futures grounded in recognition, dignity, and shared memory.
Three of the works to be presented have already been acquired by a major museum, but in the attached brochure you will find the remaining available pieces. For further information and acquisitions, please contact:
Gabriela Rosso rosso_gabriela@yahoo.ca