Sandra Gamarra Heshiki: The Factors’ Order

From June 25, 2022, to October 17, 2022, The Museo Amparo presents an exhibition of caste paintings by Sandra Gamarra Heshiki (Lima, Peru, 1972), popular during the 18th century in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The works illustrate racial classifications based on family reproduction. Guided by “the purity of blood,” a hierarchical social organization to place and perpetuate Spaniards and Creoles in power. Although the production of the series focused on Mexico City and Puebla, only one example is known to have been produced outside the current Mexican territory, in the Viceroyalty of Peru. The starting point from which Gamarra Heshiki establishes connections between the identity constructions of Peru and Mexico and her biography. She points to the violence that emerges from the colonial order’s intersections between race, class, and gender.
The paintings by Gamarra Heshiki question the mechanisms of representation of the art and the museum system as ideological devices. The artist adopts a syncretic gaze where pre-Columbian, viceroyalty, and modern and contemporary material productions enter into conflict. She copies to make available certain cultural artifacts extracted from their contexts within the framework of the modern-colonial regime.
The Western classifying gaze systematized during the 18th century reaffirms hierarchies and justifies social, racial, and gender differences as “natural” categories. From this perspective, women and other racialized people are seen as “inferior” and, like nature, are assumed as resources to be exploited. Revisiting the order that gives rise to this violence allows us to detect its persistence in the present and to imagine the possibilities for altering it.