Diego Lama

Diego Lama (b. 1980) is a Peruvian artist educated in Belgium, USA and Peru; he currently lives and works in Ghent, Belgium.

His body of work is often characterized by the use of cinematic language in analogies where representations of power structures are subverted to reveal different articulations of human condition in politics, the art world, and technology, while often featuring references from cinema, science and philosophy.

He has been developing an intense activity in the field of electronic art in Peru and the most prominent feature in his visual language relates to the imagery and thought-process of cinema. This visual language is not only noticeable by the meticulousness of his productions, but most notably evidenced by its magnitude, making him a referent of Latin-American video art.

He graduated summa cum laude from Escuela de Arte Corriente Alterna (Lima 1998-2003), with a BFA degree in Visual Arts. In 2016 he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. In 2020 he graduated from the HISK post graduate program in Gent, Belgium. He has also been a resident artist at Art OMI in New York, Vermont Studio Center, Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and Site Gallery in Sheffield.

His work has been exhibited in major international venues such as the Sonsbeek Biennial, the Havana Biennale; the Ventosul Biennale, the Triennial of Contemporary Art in Prague, as well the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, The Hessel Museum of Art in New York, The Getty Center in Los Angeles, The Taylor Museum in Colorado and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Lima.

He is a grantee and fellow from HIVOS Netherlands; Wildlife Conservation Society; Fundación Carolina in Spain; and Visiting Arts in England. His work has been awarded Best Film at the Lima Independent Film Festival, Best Photography at the Petrobras-BAphoto Prize in Buenos Aires, the Grand Prize at Videofest in San Francisco, and the Lima Cinema Biennial Prize.

His work is included in several international collections such as M HKA in Antwerp, The Getty Center in L.A., the Videobrasil archive, the Caixa Forum and IVAM collections in Spain, the Instituto Cervantes in Munich, the Wifredo Lam Center in Cuba, the Museum of Art of Lima – MALI, as well as various important private collections.

“Peruvian artist Diego Lama (b. 1980) has created a body of work that bridges the precarious field between the moving and the still image, history and coincidence,
meaning and entropy, nature and culture, and, most simply yet essentially, between object and image. All of this is rooted in a deep knowledge of
the eternal rhetoric of history painting—in the sense that all Modernist-informed art still reflects on its preformulated structures of representation.
Lama’s work has unfolded, over the last twenty years, with a particular slowness, moving at its own, thoughtful pace, a characteristic that is in fact present in
each singular piece he has produced. They are united by a certain elegance in approaching their respective subjects, as well as a clear and fearless attitude
towards effect, sumptuousness, and pathos as essential human needs.”

Martin Germann

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