Join SFMOMA for a unique “photobook DJ” performance with artist Alejandro Cartagena to explore the books that have shaped how he thinks about photography and the book form.
Rooted in his practice as a photographer, archivist, and collector, Cartagena’s work often involves gathering and organizing images within specific conceptual frameworks. Meaning emerges through repetition, juxtaposition, and subtle variation. In this performance, he brings that same methodology to life, curating books in real time under an overhead camera, with the pages projected at large scale.
As Cartagena layers images and texts, and adds and removes books from view, connections and tensions begin to surface. The audience is invited to engage in this evolving process of interpretation and observe how systems of meaning form, shift, or unravel.
The performance is accompanied by recorded videos of books being flipped through, ambient music, and a reading from Susan Sontag to create a layered and contemplative atmosphere.
Pop in early for an interactive experience drawing from Cartagena’s work. Designed and developed by Hugues Bruyère in collaboration with Cartagena, this experience uses The Latent Space, an AI model trained on the artist’s photographs of homes and the city to explore representational bias in training datasets.
About the Artist
Over the last two decades, Alejandro Cartagena’s projects have employed landscape photography and portraiture to examine social, urban, and environmental issues. His work has been exhibited at more than fifty group and solo exhibitions, including the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) in Barcelona and the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris. His work is held in the permanent collections of the George Eastman House, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Portland Museum of Art, SFMOMA, and others. Cartagena has received several awards including the international Photolucida Critical Mass Book Award, the Street Photography Award from London Photo Festival, the Lente Latino Award in Chile, the Premio IILA-FotoGrafia Award in Rome, and the Salon de la Fotografia of Fototeca de Nuevo León in Mexico. He was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2021. Cartagena lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico.