Alinka Echeverría

Apparent Femininity

In the three-part installation work Apparent Femininity, Alinka Echeverría looks back  at  the  role  of  women  in  the  history  of  cinema  and  computer programming, in order to look forward at the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Grace, named after the paradigm-breaking Grace Hopper, is an animation derived from a Berenice Abbott photograph (from the MAST collection) of an anonymous female programmer at work. Presented as an LED curtain, it is accompanied by a music created by the inventor of graphical sound, Daphne Oram. Hélène, is an installation of glass plate negatives showing solarized images of the hands of female editors. In Ada the artist pays homage to Ada Lovelace, the mathematician defined by many as the first programmer in history. Through a mosaic of digital collages she reactivates archival imagery and explores the biographies of such pioneers in juxtaposition with women left unnamed, weaved together with archetypal notions of femininity.

Alinka Echeverría is a Mexican-British artist and visual anthropologist working in multiple media. Her work has been widely exhibited, including solo exhibitions at The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Preus Museum (Norway’s National Museum of Photography), the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Arles’ Les Rencontres de la Photographie and The California Museum of Photography.