Una Luz: Photography Under Confinement in Venezuela
Armando Rojas, untitled, 2011. From the series Una Luz, Photography Under Confinement in Venezuela, 2010–12. Archival inkjet print. Courtesy of Violette Bule.
Fall 2024 Artist-in-Residence: Violette Bule
Curated by Violette Bule, Maysa Martins and Michel Otayek
Between 2010 and 2012, artist Violette Bule held a series of photography workshops in five prisons in her home country of Venezuela. Over three hundred incarcerated people participated in these free and voluntary weeklong workshops. Through a process that required the observation and negotiation of power imbalances, the cultivation of trust, and a mutual sense of agency, Bule guided the workshop participants through an exploration of the history of photography and exercises of formal experimentation and self-expression. This experience generated an extensive photographic archive, which Bule safeguarded after emigrating from Venezuela and became the basis of the 2023 photobook de la LLECA al COHUE, created in collaboration with the photography historian Michel Otayek. Una Luz: Photography Under Confinement in Venezuela revisits this archive, presenting photographic images alongside audio and written records from Bule’s ongoing collaboration with participants who have since been released from prison. This collective project, combined with Bule’s poetic texts and documentation, invites the viewer to consider life under incarceration through multiple lenses.
Una Luz resists the urge to grasp, reduce, or reveal a supposed reality of the Venezuelan prisons. Instead, the exhibition invites the viewer to move between what the images make visible and what remains concealed, between possibilities of encounter and unbridgeable distances, between the photographers’ desire to make themselves known on their terms and the structural processes that render them invisible. By refusing to reenact narratives of violence or to serve as any sort of sociopolitical denouncement or pedagogical tool, Una Luz traverses the universes of those living under incarceration in unpredictable ways. Across the exhibition, the opacity of prison jargon points to language’s role in determining belonging, trust, and even survival in carceral spaces. Seeking to challenge photography’s history of objectification, essentialization, and romanticization of those who become its subjects, Una Luz proposes a heterogeneous perspective of the inmates’ inalienable humanity. In an era characterized by mass incarceration, with penal populism triumphing amid neoliberal restructurings in Latin America and around the world, Una Luz points toward lines of flight from polarized debates and political instrumentalization that dehumanize those tangled within carceral systems.
Entre 2010 y 2012, la artista Violette Bule realizó una serie de talleres de fotografía en cinco prisiones en su país natal, Venezuela. Más de trescientas personas privadas de libertad participaron en esos talleres gratuitos y voluntarios, cuya duración era de una semana. Mediante un proceso que requería reconocer y mitigar desigualdades, cultivar confianza mutua y compartir un sentido de empoderamiento creativo, Bule conducía a los participantes de cada taller por un repaso de la historia de la fotografía al que seguían ejercicios de experimentación formal y autoexpresión. Esta experiencia generó un extenso archivo fotográfico que Bule resguardó tras emigrar de Venezuela y en el que se basa su fotolibro de la LLECA al COHUE (2023), creado en colaboración con el historiador de fotografía Michel Otayek. Una Luz: Photography Under Confinement in Venezuela [Una Luz: Fotografía en confinamiento en Venezuela] regresa a este archivo, presentando imágenes fotográficas junto a grabaciones y anotaciones que surgen de la colaboración de Bule con algunos participantes en los talleres que han sido puestos en libertad. Este proyecto colaborativo, que incluye documentación y textos poéticos de Bule, invita al espectador a ver la vida en confinamiento a través de varios lentes.
Una Luz resiste el impulso de captar, reducir o revelar la realidad de las prisiones venezolanas. Por el contrario, la exposición invita al espectador a transitar espacios liminales entre lo que las imágenes muestran y lo que permanece oculto, entre posibilidades de encuentro y distancias insalvables, entre el deseo de los fotógrafos de hacerse vistos bajo sus propios términos y procesos estructurales que procuran su invisibilidad. Al negarse a recrear narrativas de violencia o a fungir como denuncia sociopolítica o herramienta pedagógica, Una Luz atraviesa universos de quienes viven encarcelados en modos inesperados. La exposición está salpicada por expresiones de la jerga penitenciaria venezolana, cuya opacidad alerta al espectador sobre el papel del lenguaje en la generación de confianza y sentidos de pertenencia, y en la supervivencia misma en espacios carcelarios. Desafiando relatos de la fotografía que tienden a cosificar, esencializar o idealizar a quienes que terminan siendo sus sujetos, Una Luz propone perspectivas diversas de la humanidad inalienable de quienes viven privados de libertad. En una época caracterizada por políticas de encarcelamiento masivo y el triunfo del populismo punitivo como parte de reestructuraciones neoliberales en Latinoamérica y el resto del mundo, Una Luz propone vías de escape de debates polarizados que deshumanizan a quienes se ven enmarañados en sistemas penitenciarios.
Presenting support for Una Luz: Photography Under Confinement in Venezuela is provided by The Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation.
About the artist
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.