Selected by Justine Kurland, photographer, New York
While the term ‘future great’, with its implications of art market speculation, the grandiosity of its narratives and the insistence that progress is synonymous with a good life, might seem antithetical to Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano’s work, she is the artist I want to think about here. Her work offers an alternative model, one that values connection and healing, lends visibility to erased histories and suggests that the political, social and personal traumas held in our bodies might be exorcised through rituals of gestural reenactment. Her photographic language – part performance and staging, part collage, sometimes painting and moving image – expresses a hybrid consciousness shaped at once by political, psychic and spiritual forces. It reverberates with an internal kaleidoscopic rhythm, reframing the layered dimensions of diasporic selfhood, offering a meditation on identity, history and resistance. I love her work because it shows me how expansive the photographic medium can be, how it can reduce harm and honour the strange forms our lives take once the link between the camera and its weaponised position in traditional documentary approaches is severed.
In her mixed-media series Venas Abiertas (2020–), Mozman Solano maps her biography onto historical records, examining the enduring legacy of white supremacy, the fiction of eugenics, and the ongoing racialised violence against the Latinx community that intensified under the Trump administration. The title translates as ‘Open Veins’, a reference to Eduardo Galeano’s book on the imperialist exploitation of Latin America. Each piece in Mozman Solano’s series is titled with quotations from her extensive research, borrowing from sources such as Salvador, Joan Didion’s 1983 book on the Salvadoran Civil War; a speech presented at a eugenics conference held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1921; and Gloria Anzaldúa’s book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). Mozman Solano provides her viewer with a bibliography for further reading on us intervention in Latin America and a framework for understanding how contemporary US policy maintains the exploitation and marginalisation of the region, with particular attention paid to her mother’s native Panama.
Mozman Solano’s mother is the pivotal character throughout her work, connecting the artist to Panama as both a psychic and political territory, to her ancestral throughline and to a broader notion of the feminine divine. Roland Barthes has written that it’s the artist’s job to play on the body of his mother. For Barthes, the mother is a phenomenological blank slate – a tabula rasa without words or science, a source of origin before which there is nothing. Conversely, Mozman Solano’s mother serves as a conduit to history, embodying a diasporic experience unfolding in real time. Her mother dons colonial attire in Popular images portrayed populations either as undisciplined savages to U.S. interests and hegemony or as children who needed guidance (2024) and paints a mal de ojo (evil eye) on her daughter’s naked back. This symbol of protection, frequently found in Afro-Latino traditions, underscores the spiritual dimension of Mozman Solano’s work. Above the pair hangs a print of Paul Gauguin’s The Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892), depicting a naked girl sprawled across a bed in a pose that mirrors Mozman Solano’s. If Gauguin’s painting can be understood to be a signifier of the girl’s precarity and dire need for protection, we might imagine it was under his colonial gaze that she was most threatened. Similarly, Mozman Solano’s mother bestows the blessing of the mal de ojo while simultaneously representing the very forces that taught her daughter shame. As the first teacher, the mother plants the seeds of double consciousness in the hopes of her daughter’s assimilation and chance at a better life. The rips in the seamless red paper backdrop divide the scene and suggest a rupture between pre- and post-colonialism, between culture and nature, between self and other, while opening a portal to what may lie beyond.
The photographs in the Venas Abiertas series connect to her film, All These Things I Carry With Me (2020), in which an actress plays the artist’s mother. She moves through constructed sets and delivers a series of vignetted monologues, compositions drawn from the interviews Mozman Solano conducted with her mother about her immigration to the US, her everyday experiences of microaggressions and her life in the States. The inheritance of her mother’s stories is compounded by a colonial inheritance of representation defined by European stereotypes, and explored in her film Opaque Mirror (2017). Her characters reenact Gauguin’s travels in Panama, satirising his Orientalist and eroticised fantasy of Latin American ‘primitive’ life. Mozman Solano’s painted collages (2016–24) reclaim Gauguin’s favoured subjects – largely Indigenous women and the natural world – reauthoring them through her own feminist, psychoanalytic and spiritual lens. Through these acts of reverse appropriation, her series Venas Abiertas centres the figure of the mother, honours a female imaginary and casts its own spells of protection, as though we might go back in time and pull a blanket over the shoulders of the naked girl in Paul Gauguin’s The Spirit of the Dead Watching.
Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano is an American visual artist and clinical psychoanalyst working between New York and Panama. She obtained her MFA in photography at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia, in 1998. She is a Fulbright Fellow and received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Aperture Creator Labs Photo Fund. Her work will be on view in The Rose, Center for Photography at Woodstock, and in an exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Panama City, in 2026.
