​Oscar Santillán: SOLARIS  / 28 May 2026 - 1 August 2026

Solaris, 2025. Photographic lens made from sand from the Atacama Desert; series of 35 photographs taken with that same lens in the same desert (C-Type prints), Dimension variable.

Solaris, 2025 (detail).

Solaris, 2025. Detail of the photographic lens made from sand from the Atacama Desert

Placenta, 2026. Altered computer motherboards, 30 x 28 cm.

Placenta, 2026. Altered computer motherboards, 34 x 30 cm.

1'111,111 (right shoe), 2025. Nike sneakers artificially aged up to a million years (7 pieces).

​This exhibition departs from a work that enables “the desert to look at itself”.
 
In the history of photography, just about everything possible has been done to both subject and image, but the crucial aspect – the camera lens – has remained largely unaltered. Solaris (2025) is the culmination of a long-standing body of research and refinement, comprising 35 printed photographs taken with a single special lens, which together span an entire wall of the gallery.
 
This installation emerges from the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth and the world’s best-known location for astronomical observation. Over time, this vast territory has been inhabited by diverse cultures and communities, and today it is home to some of the most powerful sets of lenses in the world. To make this work, the artist collected Atacama sand, which was melted down and turned into glass. The resulting glass was then painstakingly transformed into a photographic lens.
 
Finally this “eye of the desert” was taken back to Atacama and used to photograph the desert itself. The ecological traces of the territory are directly present because the sand was not purified before being melted and turned into glass, and they distort the resulting images, showing us the desert through itself. Inspired by the acclaimed sci-fi novel of the same name by Stanisław Lem, in which a form of planetary intelligence manifests as a conscious ocean, the images and the lens here propose an act of self-awareness: the desert may see itself and we may see it through its own eye.
 
The current collision of contemporary technologies and our planetary reality suggest that the constructs that frame our civilization are exhausted. A sensible response may be to search for ways of understanding reality that do not over rationalise. In that sense, Santillán proposes materialities that awaken a sort of geological rediscovery, which manifests in different ways in the other three pieces in the show.
 
Placenta (2026) underlines the impossibility of detaching technology from nature. Taking computer motherboards as its basis, the artist strips the machinery of its function by eroding its components until its surface reveals an uncharted landscape. Electronic nodes transform into mineral-like patterns, exposing a sort of “techno-geology.” The boards appear less as instruments of computation than as fragments shaped by planetary transformation: incredibly sophisticated devices that will eventually be metabolized back into raw matter. Through this process, Santillán melds the technological and the geological, creating an almost hallucinatory terrain of machine, mineral, and earth.
 
Echoing the source and fate of our most advanced technologies, in 1'111,111 (2023), Santillán approaches time-travel through one of the most mundane objects fabricated by our civilization: white trainers. Working with scientists, the artist manages to artificially accelerate the trainer's aging and hasten its return to the dust and the dirt. This project started when the artist was introduced to a device used in aeronautics to expose components to artificial weathering in order to accelerate their aging and assess their future safety. Inspired by these tests, the artist collaborated with chemists to generate formulations customised to the specific components within a trainer. Following calculations made with scientists, it was possible to project the shoe into future deterioration up to one million years. 
 
1'111,111 confronts us with an uncomfortable paradox: A pristine white trainer is made from oil by-products-become-plastics that have their origin in the sticky black liquids that have been naturally secreted in the soil. The trainer is shaped as a modern fantasy that combines fashion and practicality, and some vestige of that fantasy endures while nature struggles to consume them, but ultimately it will succeed.

​

​
​Runs weekly, Wed - Sat, 12- 6pm until 1 August 2026



​
Oscar Santillán (b. 1980, Milagro, Ecuador)
​
​
Oscar Santillán is interested in connecting distant points: the sweat of a person with the beat of drums, paper made out of a medicinal tree with Nietzsche’s typewriter, or bringing together the breeze displaced by a running jaguar and a marble container.

Santillán began as a self-taught artist within the environment of Lalimpia, a collective he co-founded with other artists of his generation. After following different studies in Ecuador, a fellowship allowed him to pursue and obtain an MFA in Sculpture at VCU—Virginia Commonwealth University, US. He is an advisor at De Ateliers, Amsterdam (NL), a lecturer at St Joost, Breda (NL), and a visiting professor at Espol, Guayaquil (EC).
​
His recent practice is rooted in the multidisciplinary project ‘Antimundo’, an ongoing series of paintings, drawings and sculptures which envision connections between Andean forms of indigenous knowledge and emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and 3D modelling, to explore what lies beyond the known and prescriptive Western worldview.
​
Santillán is representing Ecuador at the 61st Venice Biennale, together with Tawna curated by Manuela Moscoso (current).

Santillán’s work has been exhibited at institutions internationally, including: Museo CAC, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Quito (Ecuador); LACMA, Los Angeles (USA); Guggenheim Bilbao (Spain); The Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D, Portland (USA); Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung (Taiwan); Macalline Art Centre, Beijing (China); MUAC, Mexico City (Mexico); Frac Île-de-France, Le Chateau (France); IMMA—Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (Ireland); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (Netherlands); Delfina Foundation (UK); BPA/Raum, Berlin (Germany); Garage Rotterdam (Netherlands); RADIUS, Delft (Netherlands); Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (Mexico); NRW FORUM, Düsseldorf (Germany); SongEun Art Space, Seoul (South Koreea); Zadkine Museum, Paris (France); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (Poland); Miettinen Collection, Berlin (Germany, 2025); Philara Collection (Germany); Rochechouart Musée d’art contemporain, Rochechouart (France); Album Arte, Rome (Italy); STUK, Leuven (Belgium); Trienal Poligráfica, San Juan (Peurto Rico); Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (UK); National Dutch Dance Festival, Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (Netherlands); Oud-Rekem Castle, Rekem (Belgium).
 
Santillán has been commissioned for projects by the Diriyah Biennale, Jeddah (Saudi Arabia); Yokohama Triennial (Japan); Ballroom Marfa (USA); Bienal de Arte Paiz (Guatemala); Laboratorio de Arte Alameda (Mexico); and the Eli and Edithe Broad Museum (USA). 
 
Residencies include Jan van Eyck (Netherlands); Delfina Foundation (UK); Fondazione Ratti (Italy); Skowhegan (USA); Seven Below (USA); Leiden Astronomical Observatory (Netherlands). He is currently working with the HoltSmithson Foundation’s The Island Project: Point of Departure alongside Tacita Dean, Renée Green, Sky Hopinka, Joan Jonas (between 2021 and 2026).

His work is part of international public collections, includng: Jumex, Mexico City (Mexico); LACMA, Los Angeles, California (US); CIFO, Miami, Florida (US); Centraal Museum, Utrecht (Netherlands); FRAC Ile-de-France, Paris (France); Adrastus (Spain/Mexico); Museum Voorlinden (Wassenaar, NL); Fries Museum, Leeuwarden (Netherlands); Otazu (Pamplona, Spain); Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (Mexico); Teylers Museum, Haarlem (Netherlands).

​
For a full CV please click here.



​