Maria Teresa Ponce understands how people develop a nostalgia for the country they have left behind, where their own friends, family, places, experiences, and history have remained. Ponce left Ecuador when she was nine and moved to the US, where she spent her youth, and studied architecture. After she completed her degree, she returned to Ecuador to find a country in economic crisis, with no work to be found for young architects.

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This crisis resulted in Ponce turning to art: she began to take photographs. She experienced that photography opened up new worlds which interested her, but to which she hardly had access. Her photographic work investigates the inner world of prisons, including their inmates. She then digitally superimposed the photographs from the prisons onto photographs of a condemned hospital building, thereby representing the ailments of an institution meant for rehabilitation. more »

In his work, the Ecuadorian artist Miguel Alvear works with motifs that originate from the pop culture worlds of South America. He mixes popular icons with historical, mythological, and art historical examples. Sometimes he brings together images from different social environments, combining things that normally try to stand apart due to taste or class distinctions. This approach to art, which ignores the concerns of snobbery and taste, creates friction. In his work, Popular Mechanics, commissioned by the City Museum of Quito, Miguel Alvear reestablishes the flashy, over-the-top style of female Tecnocumbia dancers in the imagery the local public bus drivers like to display on their dashboards. In the end, his work, which is basically reflecting the taste of the public, was not accepted by the museum as a symbol of Ecuadorian culture.

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Miguel Alvear comes from a film and video background. He studied at the Institut des Arts de Diffusion in Belgium and then at the San Francisco Art Institute in California. This cinematic background comes through in his photographs, which are like cinematic still images – Tableaux Vivants, which mix the sacred with the grotesque, the fluid with the static, landmarks with garbage, and, like in the Tecnocumbia songs, religious language with sexually provocative imagery. more »