Paloma Contreras Lomas and Ines Doujak

CARA’s Spring 2024 exhibition presents work by artists Paloma Contreras Lomas (b. Mexico, 1991) and Ines Doujak (b. Austria, 1959), creating an  intergenerational, feminist dialogue between their practices. In the spirit of do-it-yourself activist movements and political satire, Contreras Lomas and Doujak mobilize grotesque, subculture aesthetics and intimate storytelling to critique patriarchal systems and their intersections with capital. The artists's work upends hierarchies of race, class, and gender and complicates the notion of “woman” as a social category and set of prescribed roles. Contreras Lomas and Doujak mobilize empathy and fiction as vehicles for a deeper understanding of the human experience and activate wit and humor to offer historical insights into the long-standing nature of oppression and the systemic forces that have maintained it. They claim everyone’s right to everything, using horizontality and collaboration as strategies for resistance.

The artists use baroque, eccentric, and seductive imagery, including cartoons, anatomy books, mass media, and haute couture designs, to make play an irresistible part of our political commitments. The exhibition exposes exploitative structures, such as class, gender, and biopolitics, and counters them with cacophony—the layering of voices speaking, singing, and shouting in community. In spite of gendered violence and the failures of an increasingly globalized world, both Contreras Lomas and Doujak continue to locate hope in shared speech. Their work leans into complexity and interconnection, contaminating beauty with a spirit of mischief and joy.

Spanning sculpture, film, and illustration Mexico City-based artist Paloma Contreras Lomas combines colorful aesthetics and fetishized, pop culture representations of Mexico to entice the viewer. But beyond the fuzzy sculptures, smiling cartoon characters, feathers, and sombreros lie the violent realities of border relations, machismo, and ongoing US imperial intervention into Mexican life and politics. In her practice geopolitical histories interweave with film noir fantasies and family narratives, creating speculative spaces where fear and imagination are equally present. Harnessing the child-like affect of simultaneous horror and glee, Contreras Lomas’s work invites ghosts out to play.

Ines Doujak’s irreverent practice, which spans decades of performance, collage, sculpture, and public interventions, interrogates human impact on the land, on ecology, and on microbiology through aesthetic strategies of shock and humor. Like Contreras Lomas, Doujak uses hyperbole as a tool for critique as she considers the violent impacts of global trade, trafficking, and exploitation, and explores possibilities of class rebellion. She thinks about contamination in the broadest sense, addressing everything from pandemics to ongoing environmental crises and the possibilities of letting yourself be exposed to and affected by the lives and stories of others.

The exhibition will culminate on May 4, 2024 with a public parade convened by Ines Doujak and co-presented with the New York City AIDS Memorial. Honoring intergenerational histories of coalition-building and resistance, the parade celebrates the legacies of movement elders whose presence informs the collective, ongoing work toward envisioning and realizing better worlds. Collaborating with artists and health justice organizations to be announced soon, the parade memorializes shared histories of rebellion. It offers space for the coexistence of grief and levity, commemorating the lives lost to AIDS and ongoing struggles for liberation from patriarchal oppression. Weaving together pasts and presents of hope, the parade invites all who choose to join into an ongoing process of remembrance.

Find more information about New York City AIDS Memorial here.

Paloma Contreras Lomas and Ines Doujak is curated by Manuela Moscoso, Executive Director and Chief Curator with support from Rahul Gudipudi Senior Curator; production by Agustin Schang, curatorial assistance by Marian Chudnovsky, and activations supported by Emmy Catedral.

Images by Luis Corzo, courtesy of CARA.