On staging memory, architecture as witness and the ethics of exhibiting catastrophe.
Jorge Tacla, Identidad Oculta (Hidden Identity)163, 2022. From ‘Identidades Ocultas’, 2005–ongoing. Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.
Over the past forty years, Jorge Tacla has explored places where history is deeply affected. His work often shows pressured bodies, charged landscapes, and buildings altered by power, influenced by experiences of exile, political violence, and the ongoing flood of images. Living between Santiago and New York since 1981, Tacla has developed a visual approach that remains open-ended, focusing on what remains after disaster and the ongoing impact of trauma.
At Sharjah Art Foundation, Tacla’s most expansive exhibition to date, ‘Time the destroyer is time the preserver’, brings together more than 170 works across eight interconnected chapters. Curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, with Abdulla Aljanahi, Curatorial Assistant at the Foundation, the exhibition borrows its title from T.S. Eliot and frames time as a volatile force that corrodes and conserves in the same gesture. It spans Tacla’s journey from the early figurative urgency of Body and Violence to the charged terrains of Remembering the Desert, covers the architectural geometries of A Geopolitical Triangle, and culminates in the scorched testimonies of Injury Report and the intimate ritual of Anatomy of Dyslexia. Throughout, the exhibition traces how memory is constructed, suppressed, and reclaimed.
The later chapters, Scenes of Protest, Hidden Identities, and Rubble, move the narrative toward collective resistance and global catastrophe. These chapters confront the politics of representation without surrendering to spectacle. Together, these works offer a meditation on trauma as both intimate and systemic. In this context, Suzette Bell-Roberts speaks with the artist about shaping this survey, the role of architecture as witness, and the ethical demands of staging Tacla’s work in a time marked by image saturation and compassion fatigue.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: The title Time the destroyer is time the preserver suggests a paradox at the heart of your practice. How do you understand time as both an eroding and an archival force across four decades of working with violence, memory and aftermath?
Jorge Tacla: Trauma does not just happen to us; it gets stored in us, and memory is the main way it does so. Also, for me, destruction is not just one historical event (like a bombing or a natural disaster) but a continuous state of being. As architecture is a surrogate for the human body, when a building is destroyed, time accelerates, stripping away its skin to reveal its skeletal remains. The act of painting ruins is an act of archiving with the debris left behind by violence.
Instead of following a linear retrospective, the exhibition unfolds as eight chapters. How did you approach structuring this narrative, and what does this chaptered form reveal about continuity, rupture, and return in your work?
First, I would like to state that this was a curatorial decision from the excellent team at Sharjah Art Foundation. It was curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, with Abdulla Aljanahi, Curatorial Assistant at the Foundation. We worked for a long time selecting the works of the four decades of my career.
My work is not linear. I work on my different series simultaneously; each series has its own unique style. On my own battlefield, the different concepts I take on help me develop the languages of my paintings. By grouping works from the 1980s alongside pieces from the 2020s, the structure forces a dialogue between different eras of my life. I do not move away from early trauma; I think of it as returning, with new tools and deeper perspectives. The return is an act of memory and resistance.
Jorge Tacla, Tiempo y Espacio en Negativo (Time and Space in Negative), 1990. From ‘Un Problema Hemisférico / Tiempo y Espacio en Negativo (Hemispheric Problem / Time and Space in Negative)’, 1989–1990. Courtesy of the artist.
In ‘Body and Violence’, your early figurative paintings emerge from the charged atmosphere of 1980s New York. How did racial tensions, media saturation and the influence of Francis Bacon shape your understanding of the body as a site of political inscription?
The 1980s in New York were defined by deep systemic friction—the Reagan era, the rise of the AIDS crisis, and high-profile racial violence. I used the distortion of the human figure to represent internal psychological states. In ‘In Body and Violence,’ the blurring of features suggests a body in the process of being erased or unmade. Bacon’s work influenced my tendency to isolate the body within a confined, often sterile or clinical space, echoing the feeling of being trapped within a political system or an indifferent urban landscape. Also, a very influential influence for the isolated bodies of the 1980’s works is deeply related to the contortion of the body in voodoo rituals.
As a Chilean artist in a foreign metropolis, I channelled the feeling of being an outsider. The body became a site of dislocation, where the struggle to belong or to remain visible was a daily political act.
Your repeated engagement with the Atacama Desert challenges colonial ideas of emptiness through what you call the “remnants of the living”. Building on the preceding discussion of bodies as sites of political inscription, how does landscape function in your work as a carrier of suppressed histories and unresolved presences?
The landscape is never scenery or a passive backdrop; I reclaim the space as a witness. My time in the Atacama Desert helped me question the language of representation in all its meanings. I developed a way of painting in ‘Negative’, akin to a photographic film negative. As a result, what remains in the work is the essence of living.
To me, working with the ‘negative’ is a political statement that deals with the conflict of power by rejecting the physicality of the matter in the landscape, the bodies and the buildings. The negative images in my work are not contaminated by the ambitions of materiality. For me, the Atacama Desert is not empty; it is densely populated by memory.
Throughout your work, architecture recurs as a proxy for power, control, and resistance, from the Pentagon to La Moneda Palace. How does this theme build on your earlier explorations of landscape and history, and what draws you to build structures as witnesses to violence, especially when human figures are absent?
To me, architecture serves as a visceral proxy for the human condition, particularly where political power intersects with trauma. In the absence of human figures, the architecture itself becomes the protagonist or the victim, communicating through a kind of silence. By removing literal bodies, I compel the viewer to confront the structural violence behind the destruction, allowing the buildings to speak as victims of political and ideological ambition.
Jorge Tacla, La Distribucion de los Primarios (The Distribution of the Primes), 1995. Included in series ‘Identidades Ocultas (Hidden Identities)’, 2005–ongoing. Courtesy of the artist.
‘Injury Report’ incorporates burned documents and destroyed drawings, acts that echo censorship and erasure. Continuing your exploration of architecture as witness, how do you negotiate the ethics of destruction within your own practice while seeking to honour silenced voices?
For the Injury Report installation, I burnt my documents and drawings at the same location—Chile’s principal teacher’s college. This action mirrored acts of censorship and state-sponsored erasure that took place in 1973, with the military book burnings.
I use historical trauma in my work to ensure that such acts of erasure are a present memory, treating the ruined documents as a physical testament to the silenced voices of that era, of the past, our present, and our future.
Your notebook drawings, produced daily as a ritual, move between intimacy and historical weight. As we consider your long engagement with collective trauma, how does this private discipline feed into large-scale works and sustain your practice?
My daily ritual starts with reading poetry and making drawings in my notebooks. This practice helps me balance experiencing poems with processing what is happening in the world. These drawings act as a bridge, connecting the visceral immediacy of a private moment and my paintings. The notebooks become a space where I process the overwhelming flow of external information.
In the final chapter, ‘Rubble’, viewers are confronted with global catastrophes without clear moral hierarchies. Reflecting on your sustained engagement with violence, what responsibilities do you believe artists carry today in representing violence without reinforcing spectacle or compassion fatigue?
I address modern violence by focusing on the aftermath rather than the act of destruction. By removing clear moral hierarchies, I invite viewers to reflect on their own roles and the collective memory of global catastrophes.
This speaks of a social rupture, a significant breakdown or disruption in the normal functioning of a society. Trauma changes how memories are encoded under extreme stress; the brain shifts into a survival mode. In my work, I do not treat memory as something stable or nostalgic; instead, I paint it as fragile, fractured, and physically scarred like some ruined architecture, collective trauma, and personal exile.
The exhibition is on view at the Sharjah Foundation until 7 June 2026, in Galleries 1, 2, and 3 in Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah City. For more information, please visit the Sharjah Art Foundation.
