Andres Bedoya

La Paz, Bolivia, 1978

            Andrés Bedoya's works investigate the complex of rituals, beliefs, and objects of the Andina region by the introspection on his own biography. Through a wide range of media, including drawing, photography, performance, video, and installation, the artist enhances the capacities of materials to become narrative devices and conceptual supports for an artistic ethic dedicated to caring for a segment of the past and tradition that appear to be in danger.

            Bedoya gained significant critical acclaim with his work "Ultra Madre," presented at the National Museum of Art in La Paz in 2009. Conceived as a recreation of his mother's death, where the artist projects personal loss as an occasion for reflecting on impermanence and transformation. Consisting of a scaffold-like structure arranged for 57 women to lie still for an hour so that their hair formed a tapestry, the piece coined two enduring marks of the artist: meditation as practice and the therapeutic function of art. Thus, it is not coincidental that, at the crossroads between communal past and personal memory, the artist's body becomes a true territory for exploring tensions between inheritance and the future.

            Placed in the spotlight, the bodily experience is a surface that ceases to belong to the artist's private and individual world to become capable of reflecting and imbuing cultural, collective, and public practices with meaning. An example of this was the creation of three death shrouds in 2014, meticulously crafted from the union of metallic scales, which simultaneously opened the way for the experience of personal mourning and allowed reflection on the loss of the sense of work and time in the present. In 2022, he participated in the first edition of the FAARA residency in Uruguay, where he focused on learning techniques and crafts such as dental porcelain, glass, and goldsmithing, and has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Bolivia, as well as in the United States, Norway, Brazil, Chile, the United Kingdom, and Argentina, among others.