I look for You Under Another Name: Guatemalan Journal

I Look For You Under Another Name. Guatemalan Journal by Ana Gallardo is the winning project of the Julius Baer Art Prize for Latin American Female Artists, an award initiated by Julius Baer and MAMBO. The Argentine artist (1958), renowned for her multimedia feminist art addressing violence, exclusion, and death, developed this work in collaboration with Kaqchikel activist María Us.

The exhibition merges art and life by recounting the shared experience of Gallardo and Us during the Guatemalan Civil War (1987-1990) and the subsequent search for the women they bonded with, finding testimonial fragments of the extreme violence exerted against them by the military. The project materializes in a monumental new series of charcoal drawings, recreating an immersive fresco. Gallardo conceives charcoal as a testimonial tool to make women’s issues visible. The excerpts inscribed at the bottom of the drawings are from María Us’s memoirs and their shared conversations, blurring the lines between reality, fiction, art, and activism. Two obsessively reproduced videos complement the show, intertwining historical and geographic narratives, such as Indigenous women's right to land, confirming the ideology of resistance central to Gallardo's practice.

Photography by Gregorio Díaz. Courtesy of the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art