There is a scene in Peru’s recent collective memory that the body politic has struggled to process: the civil protests that erupted between 2022 and 2025 in Lima and the southern Andes, events in which fifty people lost their lives. And there is another scene, almost five centuries removed: the death of the Inca Atahualpa, in November 1532, on the threshold of the Conquest. Bridging these two poles, more than four hundred years apart, is the art of Sandra Gamarra Heshiki (Lima, 1972), a multidisciplinary and multiple-prize-winning artist — recipient of the Medalla de Oro al Mérito en Bellas Artes 2023 and Peru’s representative at the 60th Venice Biennale with “Pinacoteca Migrante” — who from July 25 to October 4, 2026, takes over rooms 1 and 2 of MAC Lima with the exhibition “Construcción de los hechos,” curated by Augusto del Valle Cárdenas.
The title itself is a thesis. Facts do not happen; they are constructed: they arise from images that circulate, are selected, edited, framed. Gamarra has always worked with the archive, with quotation and appropriation — making her own images and artistic and historical processes whose currency proves surprising — and here she pushes this method to its most extreme consequences, transforming “the poetic into the historical, the visual into the political.”
The exhibition unfolds in three movements that converse like parts of a single score. In room 1, a video installation titled “Chamota” (Full HD, three channels, silent, looping for 4 minutes and 5 seconds, audiovisual realization by Mario Colán, photography by Silvio Nilo La Rosa Huamán, VJ by Mario Osorio, production by Lin Belaunde) acts as a memorial: it reveals the creative process behind the artist’s conceptualizations, showing the behind-the-scenes of the very manufacture of facts.
The heart of the exhibition, however, is an installation of vast scale: “Construcción de los hechos” presents 24 fragmented and reconstructed ceramics, made by the renowned ayacuchano image-makers of the southern Andes Rosalía Tineo and Darwin Límaco, housed in nine iron-and-acrylic vitrines with brass labels (four measuring 40 × 180 × 125 cm, five measuring 100 × 100 × 140 cm).
The process has something ritualistic and harrowing about it. Tineo and Límaco, “guided by a substantial number of iconic photographs of citizen protest,” shaped the clay according to their ancient tradition, firing it in their kilns with full creative freedom. Those figures — born of earth and gesture — were then subjected by the artist and her team to a complex journey of appropriation, fragmentation, recycling, and assemblage. The result is images that bear the traces of violence: splintered surfaces, recomposed, welded, like bodies and like memories. The vitrines hold them as archaeological relics of a still-open present, and at the same time interrogate the ways in which the museum preserves, classifies, and narrates history.
The third movement is “República de barro,” a monumental mural of 50 linear meters executed in raw clay and water directly on the walls of MAC, in collaboration with Verónica Luján, Miguel Aguirre, Andrés Argüelles, Mauricio Delgado, and Rosaura de la Cruz, and accompanied by brass labels.
A wall of mud that quotes and rewrites the icons of Peruvian painting: Los funerales de Atahualpa (1867) by Luis Montero, the Genealogía de los incas (1837) by Marcos Chillitupa Chávez, the Batalla de Ayacucho (1918) by Teófila Aguirre, La independencia del Perú (1904) by Juan Lepiani, El indio alfarero (1855) by Francisco Laso, El recluta (1926) by José Sabogal, the Montera roja by Julia Codesido, the costumbrista watercolors of Pancho Fierro — Mulato con flores para procesión, De camino a los Amancaes, the Tapada limeña — down to the Cusco school and to a disquieting, contemporary reference: the Antimemorial (2025) by the Red de trabajadores de las artes y las culturas.
Each celebrated painting is “translated” into clay, returned to the humble, living matter from which every depiction was born. The mural thus establishes a visual dialogue between different moments of the country’s history, showing how distant forms of representation remain operative to this day — and how much their fragile, almost ephemeral matter says about the constructibility and provisionality of every grand narrative of identity.
Curator Augusto del Valle Cárdenas writes that the power of the image asserts itself “as evidence and trace,” which “come together to offer a powerful testimony.” If evidence claims to document the true, the trace (the huella, the fragment, the crack) reveals what the true leaves out. It is precisely in this space of tension — between past and present, memorial and testimony, the museum as archive and the museum as apparatus of power — that Gamarra installs her work.
Because if facts are constructed, then constructing them differently is a political act. The mud, the crack, the silent video, the twenty-four stitched-together statues: not a monument to memory, but a warning to dismantle — and reassemble — the history we have been told.
“Construcción de los hechos” by Sandra Gamarra Heshiki. Curated by Augusto del Valle Cárdenas. MAC Lima, rooms 1 and 2, July 25 through October 4, 2026. Tuesday–Sunday, 10:00–19:00. Free admission.
Photo credits: MAC LIMA
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