Decolonial Perspectives: Contemporary Artists Confronting the Colonial Wound

If colonial artists resisted from within the system, contemporary Latin American artists have taken on the task of critically dismantling the visual, historical, and epistemic structures that colonialism bequeathed to the region. From a decolonial perspective, their work not only denounces racism, exclusion, and historical violence, but also actively seeks to repair memory, make visible what has been silenced, and construct new identity narratives. They are "image hunters" who revisit the past to question a present that still bears the wounds of conquest.

The Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino is perhaps one of the most powerful voices of this movement. Her work, developed over three decades, interweaves her personal archive with the history of Brazil, a country where the marks of slavery and colonialism remain crystallized in everyday life. Paulino employs a variety of techniques—printmaking, painting, drawing, photography, performance, installation, and weaving—to address the legacy of the slave trade, the erasure of identity, and persistent racial segregation. In series such as Backdrops, he uses photographs of his female ancestors, printed on fabric and brutally sewn, as a metaphor for a history of silencing and violence: women who were always "behind the scenes," enslaved and rendered invisible, denied the possibility of speaking out. In Wall of Memory, he reconstructs a fragmented family tree, highlighting the voids that colonialism left in Black families. And in works such as Red Atlantic or Wet Nurse, he uses historical and scientific archives to denounce how the anthropometric and picturesque photography of the 19th century served to exoticize, dehumanize, and naturalize slavery, promoting a racism that endures to this day. Paulino, along with other artists, produces a visual critique of the "coloniality of power," revealing the "colonial wound" and its effects on bodies and identities.

In Argentina, the artist Mirta Toledo addresses the same wound from another perspective: making visible the Afro-Argentine heroes erased from national history. Her series of paintings, Invisible Argentine Afro-descendant Heroes, rescues from oblivion the Black people who fought in the wars of independence, including women, as well as artists and politicians whose contributions were systematically denied. Toledo not only paints, but also constructs a new historical iconography, challenging the hegemonic narrative that built a white and Europeanized Argentina at the expense of the exclusion of its Afro-descendant population. Her work is an act of symbolic reparation and an invitation to rethink national identity from its constitutive diversity.

Along the same lines, the Brazilian photographer Moisés Patrício uses his own body as a visual battleground. His series, Aceita? Patrício documents his right hand in diverse contexts—public and private, spiritual and everyday—recording both his connection to the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé and the rejection and racial segregation he faces daily. Through this intimate and political record, Patrício reveals the persistence of structural racism in Brazil and affirms, from his own experience, a proud and resilient Black identity.

Finally, artists like Adriana Varejão offer a visual critique of coloniality through the reappropriation of iconic elements of Portuguese culture, such as azulejos (tiles). In her works, Varejão fuses European ceramic tradition with images of slave ships, body parts, and representations of nature, highlighting the degree of violence that resulted from conquest and colonization. Their often striking and viscerally beautiful pieces reveal the concealment of identities, the production of stereotypes, and the commodification of bodies and nature, prompting profound reflection on Brazilian history and its echoes in the present.

Together, these contemporary artists do not merely denounce; they propose. Through photographic appropriation, archival reinterpretation, textile intervention, and the reinvention of painting, they give "a second life to the image," transforming the material of the past into tools for imagining more just and decolonized futures. Their art is, in essence, an exercise in memory, justice, and reparation.