Teresa Burga
Aleatory Structures

Since the 1960s, the Peruvian artist Teresa Burga (b. Iquitos, Peru, 1935) has created works that constitute a fine-grained record of the social realities of her time. Her extensive oeuvre encompasses Pop Art-style paintings and environments as well as conceptual drawings and objects and cybernetic installations. The unifying constant in the artist’s formally and aesthetically diverse output in a wide range of media is her insistent endeavor to visualize complex social structures, but also the individual’s capacity for practical self-determination. The latter, Burga argues, is inextricably bound up with the exchange of information and an understanding of its contexts, which can empower people to take charge of their own lives and become actively engaged in their communities. As a female exponent of Latin American art, Burga was often ahead of her time. Due to the political situation in her native Peru, which long suffered under a military dictatorship and struggled with severe economic crises, she worked largely in isolation from the local and international arts scenes. The comprehensive retrospective is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland.