Greif Alumni: Roxana Rios on the body and the shattered mirror of art history

Where does the body stand beyond the algorithmic echo and institutional representation?

Artist Rodrigue de Ferluc (2025) argues that the essence of art lies not in the act of creation, but in the rigor of refinement. For him, the challenge isn't generating new imagery, but discerning which of the world's infinite existing visuals deserve to be salvaged, remixed, and passed on. This inquiry into what to preserve and how to re-contextualize traditional codes of representation is central to Roxana Rios’ latest body of work. In their current exhibition “Ode to Eris” at the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig (on view through March 28, 2027), Rios interrogates the weight of historical imagery. By synthesizing new visuals from old fragments, they challenge the legacy of the past and explore how historical narratives can be reclaimed for the present.

Eris, the goddess of chaos, is portrayed beyond the one-dimensional image of a troublemaker and symbolizes rebellion against oppressive structures, while her emotions are recognized as legitimate responses to exclusion and oppression. In the pre-algorithmic era, media consumption had a degree of friction and serendipity. You encountered images that were curated by editors, curators, or pure chance, often exposing you to the other. Now, I argue, images function as instruments of reassurance and mirroring of a yet-known-world. Because we are bombarded with an infinite supply of visual data, we subconsciously lean toward images that confirm our existing identity. Seeing a familiar aesthetic, a shared political symbol, or a lifestyle we aspire to acts as a hit of dopamine. When images only serve to reinforce our convictions and status, we lose the ability to decode the visual language of people outside our cluster. We become visually illiterate to anything that doesn't match our feed, don’t we? In this environment, the multiplication of images doesn't lead to a broader perspective; it simply builds thicker walls around our existing ones. We are looking at a high-definition rendering of our own assumptions.

This is the precise moment where Rios’ “Ode to Eris” intervenes like a systemic glitch. Rios repositions the goddess as a necessary rebel against these very structures of exclusion. Eris’ chaos is a legitimate, visceral response to being left out of the narrative, much like the marginalized bodies and othered identities that are filtered out from art history and perhaps today’s digital fields. In their interventions at the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Rios takes the known world of the institution, the ultimate instrument of social status and historical reassurance, and shatters its composure. They replace the figures of art history with active, staring agents, transforming, for example, a traditional portrait of a man by Ferdinand Bol into a fluid performance of gender, or elevating the chaos of gossip in Ribot’s Conversation into a vital form of subversive knowledge.

It’s clear that Rios’s series, “ALIAS” and “Echo,” provide the blueprint for how cultural signs, namely identities, structures, and connotations, manifest and become negotiable. Drawing from Drag looks, the “ALIAS” series – now on view until May 16 as part of “Present Collective II” at Spinnerei Leipzig – examines methods of self-presentation as fundamental techniques in the construction of gender roles. Originating in queer subculture with a history stretching back to the 19th century, Drag plays with the interplay between self- and external perception. Within this performative and at times activist framework, normative boundaries are challenged and redefined. Especially trans identities, who have always been part of drag history, profoundly rely on the analysis and mastering of these codes. The process of character-creation is deconstructed, revealing its components as fluid and interchangeable. Through the explicit deconstruction of gendered markers, fixed attributions are loosened and shifted; the physical surface is understood not as a static fact, but as a fluid potential.

In the “Echo” series this interrogation extends into the very mechanics of the photographic act. Within a studio set of three synchronized cameras, the distinct lines between operator, referent, and spectator dissolve. Here, Rios navigates the "closed field of forces" described by Roland Barthes (1980), where the self-image, the desired image, the external image, and the craft of the photographer collide. For a trans body continually navigating the internalized and projected politics of the gaze, echo becomes a site of critical analysis. It examines how photography, since its invention, has functioned as a cultural tool to consolidate social hierarchies and normative frameworks. By shifting and expanding Barthes’ four imaginary dimensions, Rios interlinks these forces to reflect the cis-heterosexual matrix and its gendered markers, using the self-portrait to deconstruct traditional identity categories and develop a pluralistic view of individual and collective identity.

Delve deeper into de Ferluc’s themes by reading Claudia Bigongiari’s piece “Why re-reading old images is a subversive act?” on the subversive nature of re-reading old images, or pick up the Foam Magazine 25th Anniversary issue. You can always browse our archive or Artist Features to explore different perspectives on identity politics – as Chiemeka Offor’s series “Nwanne M Nwaanyị” – or browse our recent Guest Room “When They See Us” curated by Sarah Lewis & Jessica Stark.