To speak the unspeakable, to bear witness, and to behold the truth are at the core of María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s sweeping forty-year career as a multidisciplinary artist. Her practice spans a range of intermixed mediums, from installations, performances, and photographic works to paintings, sculptures, and videos that address race, history, memory, gender, and religion/spirituality. Much of her work is created out of family stories and her background as a Cubanborn artist descending from Hispanic and Chinese immigrants and enslaved Nigerians brought to the island in the nineteenth century. In many pieces, Campos-Pons’s use of self-portraiture conveys the spiritual, internal, and embodied knowledge of her family’s ancestral roots in Santería practices. Developed in nineteenth-century Cuba, Santería, also known as Regla de Ocha or Lucumí, is a syncretic religion derived from the traditional West African Yoruba spirituality and Catholicism. The emphasis on embodied knowledge is critical to Campos-Pons’s practice, where she addresses the historical legacy of colonialism, the transatlantic trade of enslaved people, human suffering, and survivor’s guilt by tapping into collective and individual memory as a method for healing and spiritual cleansing. Her use of memories as her artistic language honours the people, places, and resistive acts of the Americas. Often, recurring symbols such as eyes, butterflies, and pomegranates, along with depictions of water, fauna, trees, and plants, function as metaphors and themes connected to the spirituality of healing. Campos-Pons is an artist who channels the energy of the Black body as a form of visual communication between past and present but, above all, as a homage to future possibilities for human existence.

WORK IN THE EXHIBITION:

Macuto (2025), installation composed of printed fabric and printed metal cut-out, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Galerie Barbara Thumm and Efie Gallery. Commissioned by Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 36th Bienal, participation in São Paulo supported by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen