ALINKA ECHEVERRÍA
Born in Mexico City, Alinka Echeverría is a Mexican-British artist, working in the field of expanded photography. She was selected as BMW Photographer-in-Residence at the Nicéphore Niépce Museum in 2015, named ‘International Photographer of the Year’ of 2012 by the Lucie Awards, and won the HSBC Prize for Photography in 2011. Her work has been widely exhibited at international venues, including Maison European de la Photographie in Paris, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Moscow Photobiennale, as well as recent solo exhibitions at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Les Rencontres de la Photographie Arles and The California Museum of Photography. Her work is part of several public and institutional collections including The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Musée Nicéphore Niépce in France, BMW Art & Culture Collection and The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
She earned a masters degree in Social Anthropology and Development at the University of Edinburgh, before studying photography at the International Center for Photography in New York in 2008. With her combined training in photography and social anthropology, her work engages the cross sections of documentary photography, visual anthropology and conceptual art. Her mid- to large-scale, arresting colour photographs reflect her sensitivity toward her subjects, whose stories she wants to tell collaboratively, with their active participation. Echeverría has travelled to Cuba to photograph the now-elderly former revolutionaries, and to South Sudan to capture a cross-section of society during the birth of that republic. In 2010, she completed an award-winning project focused on the annual Christian pilgrimage to Tepeyac in Mexico City, which explores the relationship between images and faith. Her most recent work explores how photographic inventions have forged the way photographers construct images, and how we as visual beings have learned to interpret them.