La Chola Poblete is a transdisciplinary artist who works with performance, video art, photography, painting, and objects: through a sophisticated queer imagery, she recovers ancestral knowledge from the South American territories. La Chola Poblete’s large-scale watercolours exhibit the fluidity derived from her identity. A flood of hybrid beings coexist with abstract, religious, and pop motifs, among which small reproductions of her works, such as bread masks, are included. Virgins with braids, swords slicing potatoes, and organic forms adorned with penises resonate like songs of resistance. The Virgin is a multifaceted central motif in La Chola Poblete’s oeuvre as she embodies the syncretism between Western culture and indigenous communities. Her Vírgenes Chola series takes up from the mestizo baroque the identification between the Virgin and the goddess Pachamama (Mother Earth to the Andean communities). Also in this series, the enthroned Virgins wear their attributes as pop icons. The performance Chola’s Martyrdom (2014) addresses the social marginalisation of the Bolivian community residing in Argentina, along with the use of evangelisation as a form of emotional and physical torture.
This is the first time the work of La Chola Poblete is presented at Biennale Arte.
—María Amalia García
