Teresa Burga

10 / Febrero / 2019

In her new series titled Ninas Peruanas Cusquenas, Teresa Burga depicts young indigenous women from Peru’s Andean region, dressed in traditional garments. Sourcing imagery from the internet, the drawings recall an untitled series of drawings from 1974, in which Burga selected images of women at random from various print media, and then rendered the images on paper. Those drawings, like the newer ones, suggest the perils of images without context––how assumptions are made, stereotypes are formed, and knowledge is gathered. In 1974, Burga recreated the glossy images of the hypersexualized, Eurocentric models she found predominantly featured in magazines. In Ninas Peruanas Cusquenas, boldly saturated depictions of indigenous women in traditional dress are also presented without context. Instead, Burga offers information about the process of making the drawing itself––each drawing’s title references the date of its completion. Additionally, with the mechanical distance of someone who spent a large part of her career working methodically with data, statistics, and information systems, in the margins of the drawings Burga inscribes the dates and time spent on each work––tracking her hours as if clocking in and out of a job. Formally distinct from Burga’s conceptual work of past decades, these drawings position artistic production as a type of labor––recalling her installation works from the 1970s.