Gala Berger

Villa Gesell, Argentina, 1983

            Gala Berger defines herself as a researcher, visual artist, and independent curator. Born in the coastal city of Villa Gesell, she currently divides her time between San José, Costa Rica, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Alongside curator Marina Reyes Franco, she created the Museum of Energy of Contemporary Art, known as "La Ene," an experimental space founded in 2010 with the aim of investigating and transforming the institutional modes in which contemporary art is produced, legitimized, and distributed. She is also involved in the Paraguay Printed Art Fair, which promotes alternative platforms for the exchange and circulation of independent publications. These experiences are closely related to the concerns in her works about the circulation, reproduction, and agency of objects and artworks.

            In her first solo exhibition as part of the Nora Fisch Gallery team, titled "Wild Objects," Berger presented a series of works focused on the processes of restitution of pre-Columbian cultural objects and artifacts that have been looted from their original cultures. Some of these objects remain lost, while others are safeguarded in museums in the northern hemisphere. Her work centers on how notions of memory can be transformed through historical revisions and the multiple forms of social repair processes. Focusing on these ideas, Berger makes the blending of materials and techniques a manifesto. She uses both organic and inorganic products, collecting fabrics, threads, and digital images that she then employs in the creation of textile pieces.

            The academic work of women, such as anthropologists Rita Segato and Marisol de la Cadena, become part of her resources and have a significant influence on her production. From them, she has drawn tools to develop a critical perspective on the history of Latin America. The fusion of her critical perspective and the diversity of techniques used, ranging from collage to the application of materials like crayons, chalks, watercolors, copper wire, and feathers, gives rise to works that invite reflection on agency, authorship, and the meanings conveyed by the pieces. Thus, a museum becomes a space for the production and reproduction of meanings, where each work functions as a small disruptive machine that reveals the undercurrents shaping the stories we tell ourselves.