Land Escape Paintings

Bum bum ba ye [Under Pressure] is a group exhibition that invites reflection on the tensions shaping our contemporary world, bringing together works by Manal AlDowayan, Amina Benbouchta, Gabriela Bettini, Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Babak Golkar, Ayesha Jatoi, Timothy Hyunsoo Lee, Mónica de Miranda, Edison Peñafiel, Dagoberto Rodríguez, and Jorge Tacla.

Borrowing its title from the iconic 1981 song by Queen and David Bowie—a year marked by profound political and social upheaval—the exhibition draws on Bowie’s lyrics as a metaphor for the pressures exerted on individuals by global systems of power. Across diverse geographies and contexts, the works address social, political, and environmental tensions, foregrounding a world shaped by inequality, displacement, and ecological precarity.

Within this framework, Land Escape Paintings presents a series of large-scale works that confront the intertwined realities of climate change and forced migration. Rendered through a hybrid language of painting, photography, collage, and installation, the works depict solitary, masked figures navigating abstracted landscapes—desert, pampa, coast, city, abyss—while enclosed by barbed wire and architectural barriers. These environments are not specific locations but symbolic terrains that point to a global condition of displacement.

The Land Escape works resonate with the exhibition’s broader examination of globalization and its contradictions: the promise of connectivity alongside intensified resource extraction, the circulation of people alongside increasingly rigid systems of control, and cultural exchange coupled with fragmented identities. By stripping the figures of identifiable markers and situating them within schematic, color-blocked landscapes, the paintings collapse distinctions between North and South, center and periphery, implicating the viewer within the narrative of flight and survival.

As part of Bum bum ba ye [Under Pressure], Land Escape Paintings underscores the exhibition’s central proposition: that contemporary crises are interdependent and shared. The pressures borne by others—political instability, environmental collapse, forced migration—are not distant phenomena but conditions that reverberate across societies. Like the song from which the exhibition takes its name, Bum bum ba ye [Under Pressure] gestures toward a collective reckoning, and toward the possibility—however fragile—of a more equitable understanding of the world we inhabit.