LIMA AS AN ARCHIVE OF WASTE: JULIA AT GALERÍA GATO

Galería Gato closes its first year by reaffirming its commitment to artistic practices that question and expand the boundaries of the conventional, with an exhibition that turns its gaze toward the materiality of Lima. Polish conceptual artist—based in New York—Julia Taszycka arrives in Latin America for the first time to present all the work i didn’t make, a solo exhibition developed after a one-month stay in the Peruvian capital.

The exhibition extends a line of inquiry the artist began in New York, where she started reading urban space through what is discarded: a practice born out of astonishment at the normalization of waste in that city, now finding new layers of meaning in Lima.

Taszycka walked through Lima collecting rubber sheets and strips, cables, industrial debris, appliance casings, and construction fragments expelled by the economy of waste. She does not intervene in or transform these materials: she merely cleans them lightly and displays them as she found them, revealing how an object deemed useless acquires a different presence when it enters an exhibition space.

Her work aligns with the ready-made in its most rigorous expression, where displacement—rather than manipulation—is the gesture that activates its conceptual force. Instead of beautifying or correcting wear, the artist preserves the object’s visible history.

During her artistic practice in Lima, Taszycka encountered a complex system that goes beyond the accumulation of waste: recyclers who depend on this material, informal networks of circulation and reuse, and material trajectories that reveal a city in constant transformation. The exhibition brings these fragments together as testimonies of a territory where value appears and disappears according to social and economic forces that are rarely made visible within an art space.

This approach directly dialogues with Galería Gato’s curatorial sensibility, which since its opening has championed languages that expand the conventional and focus on the processual, the urban, and the non-ornamental. Taszycka invites viewers to look at the economy of waste as a living archive of the city—a terrain still largely unexplored within Lima’s art circuit.

The exhibition will be on view through February 28, 2026, at Galería Gato, Jirón Breña 281, Plaza Bolognesi, Breña, Lima (Peru).