a secret garden

A Secret Garden brings together the work of nine artists for whom nature is not a landscape to be contemplated, but a space where identity, memory, desire, and knowledge converge. Featuring gardens, plants, flowers, and branches as both subjects and materials, the works consider nature as a site of transformation, an archive of memory, and a means of revealing what might otherwise remain concealed.

In the works of Sofía Táboas, Roberto Gil de Montes, and Damián Ortega, nature becomes a space for introspection and self-expression. While Táboas transforms the garden into a liminal space, migrating it from the outdoors to the threshold of the interior, Gil de Montes reimagines the garden as an expression of desire and intimacy. In Ortega’s masks, branches and other organic materials take on human features, revealing unknown dimensions of one’s identity.

For Nobuyoshi Araki and Fernando Ortega, photography suspends time, allowing fleeting or ordinarily imperceptible moments to be observed. By inducing a hummingbird into torpor through the controlled regulation of its habitat's temperature, Ortega temporarily suspends its rapid movement, allowing it to be observed in an unfamiliar state. Araki similarly uses photography to arrest a fleeting moment. In Shikijo Sexual Desire, Araki freezes a theatrical encounter between the body and a broken branch, transforming a captured instant into a meditation on the the threshold between life and disappearance. 

Between rootedness and displacement, nature becomes an archive of memory. Abraham Cruzvillegas’s incorporates a living plant into an assemblage of found materials, connecting organic growth to material and social histories. In Danh Vo’s works, botanical imagery and inscriptions by his father, Phung Vo, connect personal memory to histories of migration, colonialism, and cultural circulation.

Through the depiction of flowers and leaves, nature becomes a form of communication beyond words. In Diario de Plantas, Gabriel Orozco engages in an ongoing dialogue with the plants that surround him, tracing the geometric patterns embedded in their organic structures. In Akram Zaatari’s Neruda’s Flowers, floral drawings preserved in prison correspondence give visual form to experiences shaped by imprisonment and censorship.

Presented together, these works form a garden where the visible and the secret coexist. Here, the secret lies not in concealment, but in what reveals itself only to those willing to pause and look.