Exhibitions
Cristina Umaña Durán transforms breathing into an artistic experience at Arte Abierto Pedregal
In a time marked by speed, hyperconnectivity, and immediacy, pausing to breathe becomes almost an act of resistance. This is the invitation extended by Colombian artist Cristina Umaña Durán in *Los tiempos del aire* (The Times of Air) , an immersive installation on display at Arte Abierto Pedregal until August 30, 2026. The exhibition proposes a sensory journey where air, invisible yet essential, reveals itself as the force that animates matter and gives meaning to the experience of the body.
The exhibition constructs an organic landscape formed by large textile and inflatable structures that occupy the space as if they were living organisms. These sculptures breathe, expand, and contract following their own rhythm, evoking the vital impulse. In the absence of air, they remain inert, but when activated, they acquire movement and transform the visitor's perception, turning the room into a stage where breathing marks the passage of time.
For Cristina Umaña Durán, time is not an abstraction but a profoundly bodily experience. Her artistic research develops from repetitive and essential biological processes—breathing, swallowing, digesting—that reveal the cyclical dimension of existence. From this perspective, the body appears as a mutable and unstable territory, capable of containing contradictions: a space where vulnerability and strength, control and loss of control, the intimate and the strange coexist.
The installation functions as a monumental three-dimensional drawing in which the seams of the textile pieces cease to be mere joins and become veins, arteries, and boundaries that run through each volume. The result is an organic geography that seems to expand throughout the room following an unpredictable choreography, a plastic breath that continually transforms the space.
Although drawing and writing are the starting point of Umaña Durán's practice, in *Los tiempos del aire* (The Times of Air) both languages expand into sculpture and installation to construct an immersive experience. More than contemplating a series of works, the visitor is invited to inhabit an ecosystem where air becomes visible matter and time acquires a physical dimension.
The proposal is completed with an intense color palette dominated by reds, oranges, and wine tones, colors that evoke the interior of the body and reinforce the sensation of being inside an organism. Hands also appear in this universe, one of the recurring motifs in the artist's work, understood as symbols of contact, connection, and recognition of the other.
Far from offering definitive answers, "The Times of Air" opens a space for contemplation and listening. The exhibition reclaims breathing as an essential gesture that usually goes unnoticed and proposes a return to body awareness in the face of contemporary acceleration. The power of this exhibition lies in this exercise of pausing and perceiving the invisible, transforming an everyday act into a profound reflection on memory, fragility, and the time we share.
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