Pia Elizondo — Death is a Bride & Zoo

Exhibition from 17 May – 28 June 2024

Extended until Thursday, July 25, 2024

ZOO: Chronicle of confinement / ZOO: Chronique de l'enfermement

Galerie VU’ is exhibiting the work of Mexican photographer Pia Elizondo for the first time, with two of her most recent series, Death is a Bride and Zoo.

After experiencing bereavement, Pia Elizondo embarked on a vertiginous inner journey, both within herself and through her images. She undertook a long process of observation and introspection, projecting her photographs onto the wall and retaining only fragments of them by re-photographing them with a large-format silver camera.

What is she looking for? Perhaps fragments of what her photographs say about herself, perhaps signs, but in any case a breakthrough into other possibilities, an insoluble mystery to be brought to the surface of images where reality seems to contort itself.

Death is a Bride is not just a way of revisiting her archives; it raises more questions than it answers.The photographs become something else, and Pia Elizondo shows how images that might seem fixed are endlessly fluctuating and unstable, as much in what they represent as in what they conceal. Like an inner world between desire and death, where in the end nothing is irrevocable. Each photograph here contains a promise, which makes no claim to any certification of time, place, meaning or representation.

For her Zoo series, Pia Elizondo went to meet the residents of Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City, abandoned during the Covid crisis when the park was closed to the public. Between confinement and savagery, in a park deserted by visitors, she developed a unique relationship with the animals. In this enclosed space and this very special moment of confinement, the humans are also captives and time seems suspended. Through the glass panes of the enclosures that separate them, perhaps mirroring herself, she keenly observes their gestures, their expressions, their emotions and their solitude.

Troubled and poetic, Pia Elizondo’s work explores questions of time and memory, and sometimes torpor. Her photographs are the stuff of daydreams, introspections and fictions, not only for herself but for the viewer as well.