Ojalá/Oxalá
Alexa Christine Mena Tejada, Andrés Ugartechea Palma, Bruna Pereira, Carlos Páez González, Cynthia Acuña, Diego Mendoza, João Ribeiro, José Roberto, and Natalia Ulloa Casielles
“Ojalá/Oxalá” aims to represent Latine migration with the complexity it has always had.
Andrés Ugartechea Palma is a U.S.-born, Mexican, multidisciplinary artist working with installation and interactive media. His research-led practice examines non-scriptive forms of knowledge, archiving, and representation as a means of enabling critical and academic conversations around underrepresented communities. By centring the body as a site and source of knowledge, his work foregrounds forms of expertise grounded in embodied experience, engaging with theories of embodiment and their social relations to labour, working-class knowledge, and indigeneity.
Bruna Pereira is a multidisciplinary artist from Brazil, based in Abu Dhabi. On top of sustaining an arts practice, she assists various arts events and installations with logistics and curation. She holds a B.A. in Art & Art History from NYU Abu Dhabi.
Cynthia Acuña (b. Asunción, Paraguay) is a visual artist based in Dubai, UAE, since 2016. Her work explores the connection between introspection, memory, and emotional healing through a personal practice of dream journaling. She primarily combines graphite and colored pencils to create detailed, realistic drawings, reminiscing the materials she enjoyed as a child. These are combined with acrylic paint to introduce planes of color that contribute to the surreal composition by merging two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces together.
Diego Mendoza (b. 1988, Mexico City) is an artist and an educator with a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University, Qatar & and an MA in Educational Leadership from Framingham State University, USA. He has also been working in education for youth since 2015, teaching art history, visual arts, literature and philosophy in Mexico, Indonesia, Tanzania and the UAE. His expertise and interest in knowledge-exchange has led to several printmaking workshops and courses covering a wide range of techniques, from relief printing to RISO printing.
João Ribeiro is a Brazilian filmmaker and multimedia artist currently studying Film and New Media at NYU Abu Dhabi. His work is shaped by his experience living and working in Brasília and Abu Dhabi. João works at the intersection of film, visual arts, and music, focusing on stories that highlight both the beauty and the social challenges of Brazil and the Global South.
José Roberto is a self-taught passionate artist, originally from Mexico City and based in Dubai since 2021. Part of his journey includes studies in Marketing, Illustration & an apprenticeship at the legendary Death Before Dishonor Studio in San Jose, California.
Ojalá/Oxalá
Curated by Andrés Ugartechea
Hope, often spoken as faith, connects Latin America and Southwest Asia. Our tongues carry the names of our deities in expressions now taken for granted. “Ojalá/Oxalá”, the transliteration of إن شاء الله in Spanish and Portuguese, traces a transcontinental connection shaped by exchange and belief. Here, we observe how hope becomes culture—formed through migration, labour, spirituality, and the ongoing construction of home.
Each artist in this exhibition inhabits a distinct experience of Latinidad within Southwest Asia. Rather than offering a singular narrative, this exhibition attends to the complexity and diversity that Latino migration has always carried.
Visually, “Ojalá/Oxalá” speaks in the language of domesticity, transforming the space into a house that holds a collective navigation of belonging and outsiderhood.