JUAN ENRIQUE BEDOYA’S ANTHOLOGY AT FUNDACIÓN LARIVIÈRE
In its final weeks, the exhibition Mi país no es Grecia offers one of the most comprehensive overviews of the Peruvian photographer’s work—moving between the popular, the precarious, and the poetic.
Fundación Larivière presents Mi país no es Grecia (My Country Is Not Greece), an exhibition that brings together more than 250 works by Peruvian photographer Juan Enrique Bedoya, curated by Alexis Fabry. It is a major anthology, unprecedented in Buenos Aires, that encapsulates over forty years of visual experimentation and artistic practice.
The title, borrowed from a poem by Peruvian writer Luis Hernández, evokes a tension between myth and identity: a rejection of the classical canon and, at the same time, an affirmation of one’s own ground. In Bedoya’s work, the marginal, the everyday, and the “non-monumental” become both aesthetic and political axes.
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Juan Enrique Bedoya: Mi país no es Grecia. Cortesía Fundación Larivière
The exhibition unfolds across a wide range of formats—analog and digital photographs, collages, oil-toned bromides, dioramas, assemblages, murals, and personal archive materials. Each piece forms part of an open network, without a predetermined route. Visitors are invited to move freely, drawing connections between images and materials, and building their own readings.
Bedoya explores what he calls an “architecture without architects”: anonymous façades, roadside chapels, crumbling restaurants, nameless structures that, when photographed frontally and at the same distance, acquire a monumental presence. The absence of artifice becomes a gesture of respect and attentive observation toward what lies on the margins—toward what endures outside official narratives.
At the same time, the artist’s early portraits—of men and women from different social classes and contexts—reveal an egalitarian gaze that dissolves hierarchies. Inspired by sticker albums, popular magazines, and mass-market graphics, Bedoya combines conceptual art strategies with a deeply local sensibility.
Curator Alexis Fabry recalls his first encounter with Bedoya’s work in Lima in 2008, when he came across a catalogue at the MALI bookstore and discovered the artist’s way of blurring the boundaries between high and low culture—an approach that continues to underpin this exhibition. In Fabry’s view, Bedoya’s strength lies in his ability to erase borders between the documentary and the artistic, between the spontaneous and the deliberate.
The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue published by Ediciones Larivière, which traces the photographer’s career across twelve chapters, featuring contributions from guest writers and Bedoya’s own reflections on his childhood, his background in photojournalism, and his connection to popular culture.
Mi país no es Grecia runs through October 18, 2025, at Fundación Larivière – Caboto 564, La Boca, Buenos Aires (Argentina).
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