Panel Discussion: Violette Bule and Michel Otayek in conversation with Natalie Zelt

Join artist Violette Bule and her collaborator, art historian Michel Otayek, for a conversation mediated by art historian Natalie Zelt on the process of transforming twelve years of collaboration with inmate photographers into the book de la LLECA al COHUE and the exhibition Una Luz: Photography Under Confinement in Venezuela.

The group will focus their conversation on how Bule and Otayek have worked with an archive of over 3000 photographs created by incarcerated people to explore issues related to individual autonomy and representation within photography, contemporary art, political histories, and current cultural debates. After their conversation, the audience will be invited to participate in a Q&A session.

About the speakers

Artist and photographer Violette Bule examines power dynamics shaping everyday life, underscoring the entanglement of globalization and structural discrimination in migration patterns, identity politics, and populism. Her practice builds on social and economic vulnerability as a tool for creativity and political empowerment and engages with topics such as memory, violence, digital technologies, and social justice. Bule’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions around the globe, including the biennial exhibition La Poli/Gráfica de Puerto Rico y El Caribe: Bajo Presión (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2024), Day Jobs at the Blanton Museum of Art and Cantor Arts Center (Austin and Stanford, U.S., 2023–24), and the ARTBO Fair 2022 exhibition Ante América/Referentes (Bogotà, Columbia) among many others. In 2021, Bule’s public art project, Rethinking Your Neighborhood, was presented in Houston as part of a multi-institutional collaboration between Art League Houston, the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, and the Houston Arts Alliance. In 2020, Bule was featured in the solo exhibition Echo Chamber: Violette Bule at The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology (Houston, U.S., 2020). Among her many awards, Bule received the 2023 Horton/Artadia Award and was selected for the Soma Summer residency program awarded by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. Her most recent project, de la LLECA al COHUE: Photography in Venezuelan Penitentiaries, was recently published by Roga Ediciones in collaboration with art historian Michel Otayek. Bule studied at the Escuela Activa de Fotografía in Mexico City and earned an MFA in Studio Art at the University of Houston.

Michel Otayek is an art historian specializing in photography and print culture in Latin America, with an MA from Hunter College (2012) and a PhD from New York University (2019). As a researcher at the Lateinamerika-Institut / Freie Universität Berlin, his work focuses on the production and circulation of photographic images, emphasizing issues of gender, mobility, and cultural exchange. His doctoral dissertation at NYU examined the careers of exiled Jewish photographers Kati Horna in Mexico and Grete Stern in Argentina, paying particular attention to their positions in networks of cultural production. His curatorial projects include Told and Untold: The Photo Stories of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press, the first exhibition in the United States dedicated to the work of the Hungarian-born Mexican photographer, held at Americas Society (New York) in 2016. Among other institutional projects, he has collaborated with research teams to produce Repensar Guernica and Frente y Retaguardia: mujeres en la Guerra Civil, at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. His current book project, Culture Brokers: Ethnographic Photography by European Women in Latin America, considers the mediating role of photography in contexts of unequal coexistence, tracing the transnational production and circulation of photographic images in the defense of indigenous rights in Central and South America.

Natalie Zelt is a curator and historian of art focusing on histories of photography, critical race, and gender studies. She earned her doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin in 2019. Zelt has worked as a curator for over a decade, including independent curatorial projects, as a founding member of INGZ, and in institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Together with Allison Pappas, Zelt serves as director of Framing the Field: Photography’s Histories in American Institutions, an archival initiative focused on recording oral histories of the institutional formation of the field of photography in the United States. Pappas’s and Zelt’s Framing the Field research has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, and the Visual Studies Workshop. In 2021, she served as a Terra Foundation for American Art Photography Fellow at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Zelt is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in the African & African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas.