SIYU AWARD
SIYU AWARD

Valeria Leiva
Burned pupils

Burned pupils is a pinhole photography project inspired by apocalyptic solar landscapes, imagined from a time when the sun has saturated vision and the world is perceived only as light. The camera becomes a sun, the aperture a threshold and the image a poetic object: a sensitive sensor and a device for perceiving time. Between ancestral viewers and quantum temporalities, solar colors and luminous landscapes emerge, echoing the presence of a thousand incandescent suns.

 Valeria Leiva is a Guatemalan artist and curator whose work is shaped by ecological politics, decolonial thinking and post-anthropocentric worldviews.  Through time-based installations, photography and video, the practice explores questions of coexistence, care, decay and environmental regeneration. Since 2017, has served as founder and curator of Fotomaíz, a platform dedicated to contemporary photography in Central America that fosters dialogue, visual experimentation and the decolonization of photographic practice. Artistic and curatorial projects have been presented in Guatemala, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Austria, and Switzerland.

Valeria Leiva

Burned pupils

 

Burned pupils is a pinhole photography project inspired by apocalyptic solar landscapes, imagined from a time when the sun has saturated vision and the world is perceived only as light. The camera becomes a sun, the aperture a threshold and the image a poetic object: a sensitive sensor and a device for perceiving time. Between ancestral viewers and quantum temporalities, solar colors and luminous landscapes emerge, echoing the presence of a thousand incandescent suns.

 Valeria Leiva is a Guatemalan artist and curator whose work is shaped by ecological politics, decolonial thinking and post-anthropocentric worldviews.  Through time-based installations, photography and video, the practice explores questions of coexistence, care, decay and environmental regeneration. Since 2017, has served as founder and curator of Fotomaíz, a platform dedicated to contemporary photography in Central America that fosters dialogue, visual experimentation and the decolonization of photographic practice. Artistic and curatorial projects have been presented in Guatemala, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Austria, and Switzerland.