The desire to be white – be it through hair dye, make-up or other forms of conformity – highlights the deeply rooted colonial imprints that manifest themselves in everyday desires, ideals and behaviors. In her solo exhibition All the times I wanted to be white, Ximena Ferrer Pizarro deals with the intersection of (post)colonial and patriarchal power structures and their effects on individual and collective experiences and practices in everyday life.
The multi-part series of works consisting of paintings and drawings documents everyday scenes and stories that the artist has experienced herself or that friends and relatives from BIPoC communities have shared with her. These are moments that tell of racism, machismo or colonial trauma and make visible the internalized colonialism that is deeply rooted in societies of both the Global South and the Global North. The idea of western-white hegemony determines, albeit often unconsciously, thought patterns and identity processes worldwide.
Ximena Ferrer Pizarro counters this idea with and in her works with emancipatory and resistant positions: in large-format painterly works, the artist stages her protagonists, almost exclusively People of Color, larger than life. Inspired by the narrative structures of Latin American telenovelas, she combines dramatic moments with absurd or humorous elements. The central body parts of the figurative, yet non-realistic painting are the eyes of the figures, which return the viewer’s gaze in a challenging manner. Ferrer Pizarro develops energetic, colorful scenes full of humour that bear witness to transgenerational wounds, conservative family structures, role attributions, racializing clichés, economic inequality, classism and postcolonial distortions, but also to the resistance to submit to white ideals of beauty in order to create one’s own models of identification instead.
In her painting practice, she combines abstraction with pre-Columbian art styles crosses human proportions and develops idiosyncratic images of the body that are emancipated from hegemonic art traditions. These bear witness to the desire and necessity to give racialized bodies an empowering visibility. At the same time, her images point to the gaps in male-dominated, Western art history, in which Black people and People of Color, especially women, have rarely appeared as protagonists: neither as artists nor as subjects of artistic works.
At a time when racist and colonial power relations seem to be even more palpable, Ferrer Pizarro’s exhibition offers an urgent and necessary reflection on identity, belonging and “micropolitical” resistance. Her painting is not only an expression of individual experience, but also a political gesture that emphasizes the need for decolonial and feminist art production.
Ximena Ferrer Pizarro (*1994, Lima) paints energetic scenes in which her figures confront the viewer in a challenging way. Her painting – figurative but not realistic – questions inequalities, interculturality and subjective well-being with a sharp-tongued, vulnerable sensibility. She studied painting at the weißensee academy of art berlin and UNAM, Mexico City. In 2024, she received the Elsa Neumann Scholarship for “All the times I wanted to be white” and the Rainer Wild Foundation Art Prize. She is nominated for the STRABAG Artaward International 2025. Her works have been exhibited internationally and are part of the collections of the Berlinische Galerie and the Stadtmuseum Berlin.
https://ximenaferrerpizarro.com/
PROGRAM
Artist Talk
with Ximena Ferrer Pizarro and Daniela Bystron
22.5.2025 // 19:00
