at the exhibition La Chola Poblete – Andean Pop, on display at MASPThe exhibition immediately challenges the viewer's perspective. More than simply displaying works, it triggers interpretations that expand and unsettle: identity, religion, and power appear in constant conflict. The exhibition is part of the program Latin American Stories, the curatorial focus that occupies the museum throughout the year.
La Chola's production is structured around a logic of accumulation and deviation. Signs overlap, references contaminate each other, visual codes are displaced from their original contexts and reinscribed in a grammar that rejects clear hierarchies. In this process, what could be read as excess reveals itself as method: a saturation strategy that prevents the stabilization of the gaze. The 31 works gathered do not compose a linear path. but an unstable field, in which each image seems to reopen the problem posed by the previous one.
As curator Leandro Muniz, who shares the curatorial duties with Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of MASP, observes, “La Chola manifests itself in the first person, but transcends the realm of the intimate and projects itself into the collective, addressing indigenous identities, gender dissidence, and the persistent effects of colonialism in Latin America.”
Formally, the exhibition is structured around a language of contamination. Elements of pop culture coexist with pre-Columbian iconography, religious references, and signs from art history, producing a dense, sometimes excessive, visuality that dissolves hierarchies between the erudite and the popular. This procedure is evident in the watercolors of the series. Virgin Cholas, in which the image of the Virgin Mary is reconfigured by Andean symbols, political slogans, references to fashion and mass culture.
At the beginning of her career, the artist used performance as her main means of criticizing the system. Over time, she began to shift this discursive charge to drawing and watercolor. “La Chola realized that, instead of that type of presentation, her drawings could gain more body and presence, as well as circulate the same ideas in different formats. From there, she began to address themes such as love, life, death, religion, and anguish,” says Leandro Muniz.
The works gathered here reaffirm this demystifying character and reveal a process in constant elaboration. Drawings of all kinds transform the exhibition into a sort of imagistic multitude, composed of hundreds of seemingly dissonant little characters, but articulated by a recognizable poetics. Figures such as Che Guevara, Mafalda, mermaids, virgins, dancers, and indigenous people coexist within this collection. The recurrence of a fragmented narrative reinforces the choice of the artist, trained in pedagogy, for a visual construction that mirrors the tensions and contradictions of contemporary life.
La Chola interprets her insertion into the Argentinian art circuit as part of a broader movement of institutional reconfiguration in Argentina, marked by pressure, diversity, and the revision of historically exclusionary criteria. In her account, the opening of the market to trans, Black, and Indigenous artists does not appear as a concession, but as a paradigm shift that she consciously embraced. “I started exhibiting in this context. I accepted because I knew that, in addition to being trans and having Indigenous origins, I had talent,” she states, challenging interpretations that would reduce her presence to a policy of inclusion.
This positioning gained international recognition at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024), where La Chola received an honorable mention for The Chola Virgins, presented in Arsenali di VeneziaMore than just institutional recognition, the award broadens the scope of issues already present in his work and places them at the center of symbolic debate.
In her acceptance speech, the artist states that she is the first Indigenous and trans Argentinian to receive this recognition in Venice. The statement does not appear as an individual celebration, but as evidence of a historical gap. In the end, she summarizes this critique in a direct phrase, "Argentina is not white," questioning the national imaginary that has been constructed as European, based on the idea that the country was formed by immigrants who arrived by ship, while Indigenous populations were systematically marginalized.
Recognition at the Biennial broadens international reach, but, as Leandro Muniz observes, it's not limited to just that. "The presence of La Chola Poblete among the select group of young artists for whom MASP publishes the exhibition catalog is no small feat."
La Chola Poblete was born in Guaymallén, in the Mendoza region, where she spent her childhood and adolescence, a period in which she still identified as a boy. “I always wanted to be a singer and be on stage. I'm a visual artist because I can't sing,” she states. Her work largely stems from a desire to retell the erased side of Latin American history, especially what she calls “Brown Argentina,” a historically invisible segment. “In my country, I attract more attention for my skin color and indigenous features than for being a trans woman,” she observes.
Beyond the political dimension, her work incorporates references to pop culture and religiosity. The artist declares devotion to the Virgin Mary, a central figure in the series. Virgin Cholas, awarded in Venice. This project includes 33 works, 28 of which were already completed at the beginning of this year. Religion constitutes one of the structuring axes of her trajectory. “Before dealing with her identity in a more peaceful way, she, like a large part of the LGBT population, went through different religions, including Mormonism,” says Leandro Muniz. All of them are fields of tension between Catholicism, popular spiritualities and personal experiences, functioning as visual devices where faith, oppression and identity intersect.
In this sense, a striking experience occurred during her adolescence, when two Mormon missionaries visited her home in a poor, peripheral neighborhood of Guaymallén. “While they were talking to my mother, I observed their whiteness, their light eyes, their black suits. At one point, I even thought I was interested in them,” she recalls. The episode reverberates in her recent work. In The wolf (2023), one of the most impactful works in the exhibition, two missionaries examine a hybrid figure, half man, half wolf. Already in Virgin of the Milk (2023), the artist depicts herself inside a butcher shop, holding a baby in her lap, in the presence of a missionary. In another work from the same year, she appears naked, suspended by a hook, in a butcher shop next to parts of a butchered ox, in the presence of a missionary. The scene directly evokes the logic of displaying and evaluating the body as a commodity.
Amidst impactful images, La Chola's work is also constructed from small stories that relate to the world of news. Leandro Muniz highlights, for example, a watercolor that presents the coat of arms of the city of Mendoza with an All-Star sneaker hanging from it, an allusion to tragedies similar to the Kiss nightclub fire in Brazil, which claimed the lives of dozens of young people. "In this sense, La Chola's work establishes a beautiful and sensitive transition between micro and macro experiences, from the perspective of an Indigenous trans woman, addressing themes such as love, friendship, transphobia, and gender," states the curator.
At MASP, the La Chola Poblete exhibition avoids a conciliatory conclusion. At the end of the exhibition, there is no synthesis. Upon leaving, the visitor takes away not answers, but the evidence that certain images, when truly incisive, do not allow themselves to be appeased.
