Gaps and Ghosts: Sandra del Pilar

Zilberman Istanbul is pleased to announce Sandra del Pilar’s solo exhibition, Gaps and Ghosts. By tracing narratives silenced by fragmentation, censorship, and distorted through historical manipulation, del Pilar investigates how history takes root. In Gaps and Ghosts, history resides not only in archives, but also in suppressed collective memory where it has been intentionally obscured or erased. The exhibition constructs a conceptual map that brings together practices of intervention and reimagining in five chapters.

In her practice, Sandra del Pilar pursues the fractures and gaps that are left behind the conventional historical narratives. Working from a postcolonial and feminist perspective, she approaches images as sites where the personal and the political intersect. Employing transparent synthetic fibers like gauze and tulle, del Pilar creates layered spatial structures in which image and body intersect, transforming the surface into a spatial and temporal field. These surfaces generate an unstable field of perception between the viewer and the image. As Gaps and Ghosts follows erased narratives and suppressed voices, it blurs the lines and creates new thresholds between past and present.

In the first chapter, Remainings, del Pilar takes Édouard Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1867–69) as a point of departure; a painting fragmented and dismembered upon conceivement and only reassembled much later. As a pointed critique of imperial politics, the painting depicts the execution of Maximilian, an archduke who was appointed as an Emperor to Mexico by Napoleon III. Subsequently, the painting was erased from history before ever reaching the public eye and pushed into obscurity and silence. In del Pilar’s work, the censored remnants of Manet’s painting become an allegory of the ongoing erasure of visual and historical testimony. Through the physical violence inflicted upon the image, del Pilar recalls the means of control in history. By repositioning Manet’s suppressed composition as a site of political memory, she reads it alongside Goya’s imagery of revolt, approaching the painting not as a mere witness but as a wounded, silenced space. In the first chapter, landscapes appear not as representations but as “ghost zones”; sites in which disappearance and endurance exist simultaneously. These are spaces where history has been erased yet continues to reverberate, surfaces that sustain a silent form of testimony, much like Manet’s fractured composition.

Consisting of eight hand colored lithographs, the second chapter, Memorias de mañana (Archive for an Imagined Future), renders together the visual language of 17th-century colonial maps while imagining an unwritten future. Del Pilar approaches maps not merely as lines that delimit territory, but as structures that reveal how power is constructed and made permanent. Drawing from seventeenth-century colonial cartography, she redraws former Mexican territories now within the United States borders and renames these regions in Nahuatl. With the series of works, the artist imagines new possibilities for borders, languages, and identities beyond the colonial frameworks.

The third chapter, Gente de barro (People of Clay), invites the viewer into a bodily encounter, in which the spectator is forced out of the passive viewer and becomes an active participant of the work. The interactive installation consists of 156 engraved clay fragments, which visitors are encouraged to touch, trace onto paper, and take with them. In Mexican mythology, clay (barro) signifies the origin of human life; it is understood as the material of creation, memory, and transformation. Each fragment carries a hand-carved line inspired by the pictorial codices of the 16th century, where images held the power of language, narration, and resistance. Here, clay becomes not merely a medium, but a direct, tactile connection to land, origin, and bodily memory. These fragments transform into a living archive, circulating across changing geographies.

A series of nude male bodies takes over as the viewer becomes a flaneur, entering the fourth chapter, Caught in Disasters. Within the chapter, del Pilar revisits paintings she produced twenty years ago, reconsidering them through the lens of today’s political landscape. The male body becomes a site where narratives of nation, power, and identity begin to unravel. Figures that search for exits that refuse to appear, teeter on the brink of ascent, and ultimately yield to gravity, evoke the flight and fall of Icarus, pointing to the collapse of nationalist and masculine myths. A translucent layer marked with references to Goya forms a second temporal stratum, connecting different historical moments in which violence and authority repeatedly resurface. Here, the body is not treated as a carrier of heroic narrative, but as a site where heroism fractures, collapses, and is exposed.

In the final chapter, Malintzin (the traitor who wasn’t one), del Pilar turns to Malintzin, an indigenous woman from what is now Veracruz who lived in the early sixteenth century and came to be known as La Malinche. Fluent in her mother tongue, Popoluca, in the language of the Aztec occupiers of her homeland, Nahuatl, Maya, and Spanish, she played a central role during the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Long represented in national narratives as a figure of betrayal, del Pilar approaches Malintzin as a subject whose very presence unsettles inherited narratives. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of Critical Fabulation, which reconfigures the historical archive to challenge and disrupt hegemonic colonial readings, del Pilar rethinks Malintzin beyond established accounts. By building a connection between past and present, the works trace how collective memory shapes the ways historical narratives are formed.

Gaps and Ghosts oscillates between the borders of what remains and what is lost. Del Pilar does not seek to seal historical narratives, but chooses to remain within their silent gaps and restless ghosts. These gaps and ghosts shape how we remember, how we forget, and how we imagine. Each chapter offers a space of listening toward silenced stories, fragile images, and presences that refuse to disappear.


For more information, please contact Aybüke Sanuç
at aybuke@zilbermangallery.com