Crossing to the Dreams
A Home in Transit and a Ritual of Nomadic Identities
by Sofia Saavedra
EXHIBITION :: AUGUST 1-17, 2025
Opening Reception :: Saturday, Aug 1, 7–10 pm
Closing Reception :: Friday, Aug 17, 7–10 pm
Curated by Alonso Galue, Agitator member
• Sofia Saavedra has been awarded an Artist Protection Fund Fellowship while she is in residence at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and is exhibiting with Agitator Gallery.
Sofía Saavedra (b. Caracas, 1979) is a Venezuelan artist who considers painting a ritualistic act of healing. Her work aims to celebrate human diversity, which she prefers to approach as identities in dynamism, transit, and transformation. Since the beginning of her career, she has “read” identity considering its nomadic and mutant qualities. Nomadism and mutation are liminal states—moments of generative ambiguity that bring crisis and change.
Sofía’s pictorial practice is composed of figurative works on large format canvas in which the human figure appears, with a multiplicity of bodies interacting with—and dissolving into—each other, with the recurrent appearance of animals. Her tableaus remind us of our indomitable nature, while written words add rationality and poetry to the mix.
Descriptions excerpted from a longer catalogue essay
by Pedro Marrero Fuenmayor, artist/writer born in Caracas, Venezuela, 2/2025
Migration and diaspora are daily concerns to every Venezuelan, inside or outside Venezuela. These subjects are not absent from Sofía’s body of work. However, her recent participation in the Tijuana Triennial: Pictoric International Art (2021, 2024) in Mexico, and her experience as an artist-in-residence in the United States, has projected her place away from the specificity of the Venezuelan experience, and into the southern border of the United States of America, to speak of the frontier that separates the Global South from the Global North, from the theoretical and onto the very real. The book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) by Chicana scholar and poet Gloria Anzaldúa, centered on her intercultural reflections as a mestiza and queer woman who grew up at the Texas/México border, has been of special resonance for Sofía in her artistic research about migration and cultural hybridization.
HOST SPONSORSHIP & SUPPORT:
Agitator Gallery is proud to be a host for Ms. Saavedra and collaborator with University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and IIE Artist Protection Fund.