ANA BIDART AND THE FOOTPRINT OF TIME

Through playful yet earnest acts of sculpting and in-situ drawing, Bidart unpacks her ongoing contemplation of history as a construct, the fluid parallels between drawing and writing, and the poetics of spatial and temporal negotiation.

The exhibition title, Long Before the Walls, underscores how Bidart challenges dominant constructions of history and distills a visual language from a mark-making instinct that predates the fabrication of walls. She draws an analogy between a grand meteorite hitting the earth and a doodle on a misty window—it is all about how a graphic mark tells a story about inhabiting the world.

On a recent trip to study the prehistoric rock art in Serra da Capivara National Park in northeastern Brazil, Bidart became fascinated by the handprints and marks at the margins of the images. In a conventional digitization project by art historians, those marks might not be captured. Yet, the in-person encounter left a lasting impression on Bidart. This new commission attempts to capture the overwhelming sense of interconnectedness across centuries and reflect on the archetypes, narratives, and hierarchies we take for granted.

During her residency at Delfina Foundation in spring 2023, Bidart closely observed the architectural features of the Edwardian building and the ubiquitous traces left by its ever-changing inhabitants. These observations culminated in a series of soft diaries, where Bidart played with daily traces on small sheets of unstretched canvas, stitched together as books.

After two years of further research and experiments with mark-making in various contexts, Bidart returned to the house in March 2025 and expanded the soft diaries into Dust Sheets, large, loose canvas sheets forming tent-like structures for audiences to navigate with their full bodies.

For this exhibition, Bidart took residence again in the Delfina house. She first had three architectural elements reproduced in white and installed in the gallery: a handrail, a balustrade, and the corner of a fireplace. Over two weeks, Bidart searched for a balance between structure and improvisation, using oil, pigments, body paint, makeup, and pencil to reenact the multi-layered stories of the space.

In a more subtle register, Bidart engaged with the ‘noises’ of the building, such as light switches, sockets, and floor outlets—features one usually wishes to hide when putting on an art exhibition. She replaced five recessed wooden floorboards, full of scratches from furniture moving, with hand-engraved plaster boards titled Bedrocks. She dipped her fingertips in blue paint and tapped around the light switches in a finger dance. Scattered throughout the space are small objects made of rubber, cold porcelain, and papier-mâché, hand-modeled spontaneously and inspired by the notion of babbling.

Rather than radical interventions that erase the character of a space, Bidart’s creative process is a continuous act of spatial and temporal negotiation. Her actions stem from an active sense of imagination and resistance to a fixed point of view. Mundane forms become rich stories, murmurs turn into syncopation and jazz. While remixing beats, she acknowledges echoes; by playfully moving objects and bodies out of alignment, she embraces counterforce and tests the limits of freedom.

Considering handprints in cave paintings as the first record, the project speculates on the evolution of a pictorial language that connects us with our ancestors, linking the vastest stars to the minutest microorganisms in the deep sea. Unlike writing, which is mainly taught through education, the language of drawing and storytelling can be embodied and learned in myriad ways—perhaps by feeling and playing with it today.

Ana Bidart (b. 1985, Montevideo) is a visual artist based in the Yucatán Peninsula, working between Mexico and Uruguay. Her work has been exhibited in Latin America, the United States, and Europe, including the National Museum of Visual Arts, Montevideo; Cabañas Museum, Guadalajara; Proyecto Paralelo, ESPAC, and Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City; Bienvenu Steinberg & J Gallery, New York; and Galerie Perrotin, Paris.

Long Before the Walls will be on display from April 4 until May 25, 2025, at Delfina Foundation, 29/31 Catherine Place, London SW1E 6DY (United Kingdom).

*Cover image: Ana Bidart, Detail of Notas sueltas, 2023. Oil on wall, site-specific intervention, Mexico City. Photo: Courtesy of fundación/op.cit.