Una Luz: "Photography Under Confinement in Venezuela" Exhibit

Fall 2024 Artist-in-Residence: Violette Bule

Curated by Violette Bule, Maysa Martins and Michel Otayek

All events are free and open to everyone.

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 women and men 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.