Gala Berger is an Argentine visual artist, curator, and researcher who currently lives between Lima, Toronto, and Mexico City. Her artistic practice has taken her to spend extended periods of time in Africa and in other Latin American countries as well. In addition to the development of her individual work, she has consistently been involved in constituting art collectives, generating spaces for creation and encounters. During her travels, Gala Berger collaborates, collects materials, develops exchanges, and listens. Each of these facets and cooperative initiatives  informs and nourishes her textile collage pieces.

Her working process starts by collecting an array of fabrics that reflect the eclectic global nature of our lives: traditional African patterns printed in China; fabrics bought at a small quilting store on a roadside in Buffalo, New York; textiles dyed with tree bark by her close friend from the Amazonian Shipibo community; her own prints and interventions. Dye-sublimations of digital images she downloads from an open-source archive of 3-D objects become the main characters in these textile collages.

The series she presents in this exhibition originated in a news story about Argentina’s INTA (National Institute of Agricultural Technology), a governmental organization which had banned a series of critical words from their official announcements and publications: agroecology, climate change, biodiversity, gender, sustainability, carbon footprint. In response, Gala portrays imaginary social encounters around these concepts. The protagonists of these textile pieces have fruits and/or vegetables as heads and appear to be organizing activism in defense of sustainability, clean food, and the environment. The works convey a hopeful message about resistance to the devastating effect of toxic agro-chemicals through community actions, in this case and with evident humor, actions are taken by the characters that feed us: pears, durians, tropical fruits, pumpkins, nuts.

BIO

The work of Gala Berger (Villa Gesell, Argentina, 1983) is deeply rooted in Latin America. She has been co-creator of a series of independent spaces to develop her collective projects. Museo La Ene and Feria de Arte Impreso Paraguay in Buenos Aires; the artists collective Retablos por la Memoria in Peru (2022 -2024) and Casa MA (2018- 2024), a platform dedicated to promoting creative practices that emerge from diverse identities in the territory of Central America. She was a fellow at ICI Kampala, Uganda 2022, and RAW Acadèmie CURA #6, Senegal 2019.

Gala has had solo and group exhibitions in Santo Domingo, São Paulo, Lima, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Queretaro, Sorocaba, Medellin, Montreal, Tampere, Rio de Janeiro, San Juan, San Jose, Guatemala City, Stockholm, Santiago, Rosario, Toronto among others. Since 2022, she has been collaborating with Shipiba artist Metsá Rama in exploring the intersection of art and the environment, together with policy makers from the European Commission’s Directorate General for the Environment and scientists from the Joint Research Center on a project focused on art and agriculture in the Amazon.