What We Take
Latin American Artists on Identity, Memory, and Migration
From 6–28 March 2026, What We Take will be presented at Pipeline in Fitzrovia, bringing together a group of Latin American artists whose practices reflect on migration, memory, and cultural continuity. Co curated by CM Art Advisory and Art in Latin America, the exhibition addresses a question that has long shaped both personal and collective histories across the region: what do we carry with us when we leave home?
Migration has been a defining condition in the development of Latin American art for much of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Artists from the region have historically moved between continents, cultural frameworks, and political contexts, often negotiating complex questions of identity and belonging through their work. Early modernists such as Tarsila do Amaral and Wifredo Lam developed visual languages that emerged from encounters between Latin America, Europe, and Africa. Their practices demonstrated that artistic identity could be formed through exchange and hybridity rather than through fixed national boundaries. Later generations continued this dialogue in different ways. The work of Ana Mendieta, for example, explored exile, memory, and the body’s relationship to landscape, reflecting the experience of displacement while remaining rooted in cultural memory.
Within this broader historical context, What We Take brings together works by Nelson Hernández, Benito Ekmekdjian, Alessandra Risi, and Eliel David Martínez Julían across painting, mixed media, installation, and performance. Each artist approaches migration not simply as a moment of departure but as an ongoing process that shapes how identity is understood and expressed. Their works can be understood as visual archives that hold fragments of memory, language, ritual, and inherited tradition while responding to the realities of living and working across different cultural spaces.
The exhibition also reflects a broader tendency within Latin American art to construct meaning through layered references to history, spirituality, and everyday life. Art historians and curators such as Gerardo Mosquera and Mari Carmen Ramírez have written extensively about the ways in which artists from the region often operate within a network of cultural references that extend beyond national frameworks. In this sense, symbols, materials, and gestures function not only as aesthetic elements but also as carriers of cultural memory. A repeated pattern, a landscape reference, or the presence of domestic materials can evoke personal histories and collective narratives that continue to shape identity over time.
Rather than presenting resilience simply as endurance, What We Take considers resilience as a form of continuity. Cultural gestures that appear small or intimate often become the means through which identity is sustained across distance. Songs remembered, recipes repeated, stories told within families, and rituals practiced in private spaces allow individuals to maintain connections to ancestry and place even as their lives unfold elsewhere. These acts of continuity reveal how migration can transform cultural identity without erasing it.
At a moment when migration continues to influence societies across the world, the exhibition offers a space for reflection that centres lived experience. The works presented here invite audiences to encounter migration not as an abstract concept but as a set of personal and emotional realities. Through colour, material, and narrative, the artists explore the subtle ways in which memory and belonging persist across geographical borders.
What We Take ultimately suggests that identity is not left behind when one moves across borders. Instead it evolves, shaped by memory, community, and the everyday practices that carry cultural knowledge forward. The exhibition highlights the ways in which Latin American artistic production has long been informed by movement and exchange, revealing how artists continue to translate their histories and experiences into new forms.
Celeste Melgar
The exhibition opens on 6 March 2026 with an opening reception and remains on view through 28 March at Pipeline, 31 Windmill Street, London. Visitors are warmly invited to experience the works in person and take part in the conversation around migration, memory, and the cultural inheritances that travel with us.
Gallery
