This new series of works by Gala Berger originated in her research on the processes of restitution of pre-Columbian art and artifacts which had been looted or alienated from their original cultures and nations, some still missing, some in museums in the global North. Berger has created a series of textile pieces which employ natural fabrics made and dyed by women in indigenous communities, as well as other textile elements. She works by overlaying on them appliqués of digitally printed fabrics, creating a dialogue between handcraft and technology.

The images, texts and references which appear in the Objetos Anónimos series are taken from Interpol’s database of looted pre-Columbian art. The captions in the database are included in these textile collages as a way to underscore the lack of knowledge and information on their cultural context, provenance or possible authorship reflected in the database —a consequence of a colonial approach to these objects— as well as the fact that most have not been found or restituted.

The Ausangate series takes its name from a mountain in Peru where indigenous people still live today. In these works the pre-Columbian object becomes a body or a landscape, an allusion to a different concept about what is alive, typical of some non-Western cultures for which objects or landscape are living entities.

Each of the “mobiles” included in the exhibition represents a collection of Pre-Columbian art in the possession of major museums in Europe, works which are reservoirs of knowledges and history of peoples who have no access to them.

Gala Berger (Villa Gesell, Argentina, 1983) resided in Buenos Aires until 2016, then lived in Costa Rica and is currently based in Lima, Perú. She has exhibited her work in the United States, Sweden, Canada, Puerto Rico, Perú, Guatemala, Argentina, Brazil and Korea. Aside from her practice as a visual artist she has been an active cultural agent, having been co-founder of La Ene, an alternative museum born as institutional critique, as well as the artist’s spaces Inmigrante and Urgente and Paraguay, a fair devoted to alternative publications. She was recipient of CIFO, Cisneros Fontanals Grant in 2018. Her works will be included in the exhibition _Adentro no hay más que una morada_ at the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, curated by Alejandra Aguado, which will open in September 2021.