Alinka Echeverría

Echeverría hosted a BBC documentary The Art that Made Mexico: Paradise, Power and Prayers in 2017.

In 2015, She started the research-based project Nicephora during the BMW photographer-in-residency at the musée Nicéphore Niépce. This project incorporates various media including collage, sculpture, three-dimensional rendering, sound installation, photography etc. In this project, Echeverría sought to deconstruct how the representations of women have long been constructed by the male gaze in male-dominated practices of early photography. This project stemmed from the photographic archives of Nicéphore Niépce Museum in France, a museum that centers the photography of Nicéphore Niépce, who was the inventor of photography. Echeverría's interest lies in the origins of photography as a medium and Nicéphore Nièpce's obsession with infinitely reproducible images. She appropriated and feminized the photographer's name symbolically as the title of this project. Echeverría's intention was thus to problematize Nicéphore Nièpce's colonial and male gaze and practices of capturing, reproducing and disseminating images of females in French North Africa at the time. She views such practices to be inherent in photography since the invention of the medium. She scanned approximately four hundred images from the archive, particularly images of females. This project is also Echeverría's exploration of her Latin feminine contemporary perspective.

This portrait series sought to capture the gazes of individual South Sudanese at the time of the independence of South Sudan, following decades of war, in 2011. Exploring the becoming and self-determination of individual South Sudanese, this portrait series addresses the powerful representation of these individuals. Echeverría was also interested in investigating the meaning of South Sudan becoming an independent nation for its unification of sixty-nine tribes at the time. She sees this series of works as a collaborative project, in which South Sudanese teenagers would stand in front of her camera and she would expose them to the world. Being photographed a few weeks before the independence of South Sudan, this project captures various South Sudanese across social classes, including refugees to police forces. Echeverría was also interested in the birth of a nation and its transformation from social anomy to civil society, as well as the creation of state institutions.

Alinka Echeverría (born 1981) is a Mexican-British artist and visual anthropologist. Echeverría's research-based works explore issues of visual representation through the media of photography, video and installation, focusing on the deconstruction of the masculine and colonial gaze.

Alinka Echeverría was born in 1981 in Mexico City, Mexico. She was trained as an anthropologist and earned her master's degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh in 2004. Echeverría then worked on HIV prevention NGO projects in East Africa for several years. She studied photography at the International Center for Photography in New York and graduated with a postgraduate degree in 2008.