Ximena Lama was born in Bolivia and grew up in Santiago de Chile. She lives in Switzerland since 2004 and currently lives with her family in Bern. With her current exhibition she now dares to leap to the public eye with her own art and thus allows the viewer to take a look at herself.

Part of her artistic process is to be inspired by the endless fund of press and advertising as you browse through magazines. Often, spontaneous ideas shape her creative work, she chooses what she addresses, what moves something in her or reminds her of something. A crucial role in the design of their collages plays the subconscious, which manifests itself in the course of the creative process and urges for materialization.

In her collages, she processes searched and incidentally found, designed events and more or less intuitive ones. Material is recombined, single images are used to create new images and new details and details are highlighted. The aesthetics of the materials, i.e. Colors, shapes, texture and contrast are important factors.

In terms of content, her collages deal with topics such as the past, longing for the past, diversity of society, consumer society as well as gender resp. the role of the woman. With her collages, Ximena Lama wants to sensitize the viewer and introduce him to a confrontation with our world today. The various cultural influences of her personal background are also noticeable in her collages: The encounter with the Arab culture in Lama's earliest childhood and her Latin American roots as well as the influences of the European Culture are clearly noticeable in their pictures.

In Shamed, for example, the destroyed buildings, presumably war ruins, the stone tomb, a soldier from the back, and two black-veiled persons in the lower left of the picture, remind one of the harsh reality of the Middle East conflict. Misery, war, destruction that stretches for years. What remains is the yearning for peace. The topic past resp. For example, we encounter the yearning for the past in Say goodbye, where it brings life back to objects from bygone eras, when technology was not so advanced. The collage Old Habits or Postcard is to be regarded as a reminiscence of the past, of the aesthetics of the ancient scriptures, of old stories being told.

The theme of "woman" is taken up by Lama in various pictures, such as in Rosarote Welt or in the installation Pink Lady, where she shows gender-specific objects, all in pink shades. Pink as supposedly feminine color is certainly one of the most controversial colors of the present. Like no other, it has become a political issue. Stylized by the toy and fashion industry, on the one hand, as a cute girl's color, today feminist movements claim pink and pink, respectively, as a strong color of femininity and independence in their own right.

​

Andrea Bauer_Curator