Oscar Santillán: SOLARIS / 28 May 2026 - 1 August 2026
Opening Wednesday 27 May 6-8:30pm
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). 695 x 360 cm. Installation view at Museo CAC Quito, 2026.
Solaris, 2025 (detail).
Solaris, 2025. Detail of the photographic lens made from sand from the Atacama Desert.
Placenta, 2026 (detail). Altered computer motherboards.
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This exhibition centres around a work that proposes to allow “the desert to look at itself”.
In the history of art, just about everything possible has been done to both subject and image in the context of photography, but the crucial thing it all passes through – the lens – has remained largely unaltered. Solaris (2025) is the culmination of a long-standing body of research and refinement, comprising 35 printed images and a single special lens that span an entire wall of the gallery. This installation emerges from the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth and one of the world’s best-known locations 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, but these are inevitably pointed to the heavens, with their location a mere irritation to those who wield them. For this work, the artist collected Atacama sand, which was melted down and turned into glass. That glass was then painstakingly transformed into photographic lenses which are correctly fashioned, but hold within them all the particularities of the minerals of this special place. These “eyes of the desert” were taken back to the Atacama and used to photograph the environment 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 Stanisław Lem’s novel of the same name, in which a form of planetary intelligence manifests itself 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 eyes. But of course, it cannot as it would have to be sentient, and that is not an attribute that we humans have awarded the desert with. If the collision of things like quantum physics, deep ocean exploration and AI have taught us anything in recent years it is that the rules, boundaries and specifications that humans have decided and relied upon as immalleable fact are not as fixed as we once thought. We are finding the limitations of our certainties. Accompanying works like Placenta (2026) underline the impossibility of detaching ourselves or our technologies from nature, of ignoring it, or of the arrogance of thinking we totally understand it. Taking computer motherboards as its basis, the artist strips the machinery of its function by sanding and eroding its components until its surface reveals an uncharted landscape. Electronic nodes transform into mineral-like patterns, exposing a sort of “technogeology.” 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. Opening Wednesday 27 May 6-8:30pm 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. |