LATIN AMERICA AT PINTA BAphoto 2026: PROPOSALS FROM THE REGION

The 22nd edition of Pinta BAphoto takes place from October 22 to 25 at Pavilion 8 of La Rural. Among the galleries and projects from different countries, Arte al Día highlights a few proposals that offer a way into the fair’s Latin American dimension.

Sandra Eleta, Tribute Artist

This edition’s Tribute Artist is Sandra Eleta (Panama City, Panama, 1942). Curated by Irene Gelfman, Proceso Brujo presents part of the series Portobelo. The photographer trained in New York and has lived since the early 1970s in Portobelo, a town on Panama’s Caribbean coast. It was a central port of colonial America and is the cradle of Congo culture, whose inhabitants descend from maroons who founded palenques. In black and white, the series documents the everyday life and rituals of this Afro-descendant community. Her portraits, among them the fisherman Pajita, Putulungo and Catalina, queen of the Congos, are named individuals.

“Proceso Brujo opens a window onto a Central American history that barely circulates among us and pays tribute to a pioneer: a woman who made Latin American photography an act of empathy,” writes Gelfman.

Claudia Andujar at Galería Vermelho

Galería Vermelho (São Paulo, Brazil) participates in the RADAR section with a selection spanning more than five decades of Claudia Andujar’s work (Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 1931), focused on experimentation with the photographic language.

In three works from the series A Sônia (1971), superimpositions, rephotography and filters expand the limits of conventional documentary photography. In Rua Direita (1970), the photographer’s own body determines a radical point of view, at ground level, altering the scale of pedestrians and their relationship to the city’s architecture. These experiments belong to a decisive period in her career, when she was investigating new plastic possibilities for photography, turning the camera, the laboratory and projection into spaces of invention. This research remains active in O voo de Watupari, from the series Através do Fusca (1975–2024), in which Andujar returns, almost five decades later, to a plate made during her trip from São Paulo to Roraima in 1975, reworking the image with colored acrylics.

By bringing together historical works and a recent reworking, the selection reveals a practice in continuous transformation.

Joaquín Sánchez at Viedma Galería de Arte

Viedma Galería de Arte (Asunción, Paraguay) presents in the Main Section a solo show by Joaquín Sánchez (Cordillera, Paraguay, 1975), curated by Estudio de Gestión Cultural.

His work is rooted in the traveling cinema with which his grandfather toured rural communities in Paraguay, and unfolds across installations, objects, performances and video art, always with a cinematic narrative.

Sánchez works with family chronicles and personal memory, and reinterprets myths in pieces that, like palimpsests, retain their original traces. Border territories recur: there, landscape, the ancestral world and wartime events intertwine.

ATLAS: bookstore and exhibition

ATLAS presents a proposal that combines a bookstore and an exhibition. It brings together a selection from the international and national catalog of photobooks.

The exhibition area shows works and special editions in book format by Henrik Malmström (Finland), Alejandro Cartagena (Mexico), Ediciones Réplica (Colombia), Celeste Rojas Mugica (Chile), Maximiliano Magnano (Argentina) and Ricardo Jiménez (Venezuela), together with Imagen impresa by Francisco Medail, the first book from the publisher ATLAS.

Martín Bollati, the section’s curator, says that Rojas Mugica will present an editorial box around Ejercicios de aridez, a work that “mixes poetry, research and aerial photography.” Imagen impresa investigates the history of the photobook in Argentina between 1930 and 2025.

Jiménez will be honored with a tribute based on Caracas en carro, a series from the 1980s with photographs of the city taken from a car; the book and vintage work will be exhibited. From Cartagena there will be pieces from the series Carpoolers, and Ediciones Réplica, dedicated to recovering photographic archives, will present Acción diferida, an object-book.

Pinta BAphoto 2026 takes place from October 22 to 25 at Pavilion 8 of La Rural (Av. Sarmiento 2704), in Buenos Aires, Argentina