Spotlight: Felipe Rivas San Martín

Artist and activist Felipe Rivas San Martín’s multimedia practice fuses artistic representation with technology. In 1999, homosexuality was decriminalized in the artist’s home country, Chile. Since this shift in legality, Rivas San Martín’s work explores the existence of sexual diversity, while being critical of the notion that certain sexualities are inherently “deviant.”

In the series A Non-Existent Queer Archive, Rivas San Martín employs artificial intelligence to generate photographs of homosexual couples, resulting in sepia-toned portraits. In the absence of a long-documented queer history within his culture, Rivas San Martín creates his own records, stories, and visual markers of pasts ignored and untold.

Curator: Katie Wilson, Assistant Curator at 21c Museum Hotels