Alexander Apostól

Postura y geometría en la era de la autocracia tropical

March – June 2024
MAMBO – Bogotá Museum of Modern Art, Colombia

Postura y geometría en la era de la autocracia tropical [Posture and Geometry in the Era of Tropical Autocracy] is the first major institutional solo exhibition in Colombia by Hispanic-Venezuelan artist Alexander Apóstol. The exhibition critically examines the visual and ideological structures that have shaped Latin American national identity, especially around gender and sexuality.

Apóstol’s work explores the collapse of modernist ideals across the region, focusing on how nationalist and populist utopias were visually staged, and later unraveled, within authoritarian tropical contexts. He reflects on Venezuela’s artistic legacy, from the academic realism linked to the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez to the vibrant abstraction of optical and kinetic art that once symbolized the petro-modernist dream.

Key works such as Ensayando la postura nacional (2010) and Régimen: Dramatis personae (2018) explore how bodies are choreographed to support national myths. In Avenida Libertador (2006), trans and gender-nonconforming figures challenge normative visual and political orders.

Other works, like Partidos políticos desaparecidos and Contrato colectivo cromosaturado (both 2018), reveal how geometric abstraction was co-opted to promote a supposedly neutral modernity, later unmasked as ideologically exclusionary.

Curated by Eugenio Viola and Cuauhtémoc Medina, the exhibition exposes the aesthetic mechanisms behind tropical autocracies and their ongoing influence in Colombia and beyond.