©Salua Ares, Azinhaga, Tentou em vão apagar o tempo (Tried in vain to erase time), 2021 Photograph with inkjet print on Hahnemühle PhotoRag and cement-like frame

©Salua Ares, Azinhaga, Tentou em vão apagar o tempo (Tried in vain to erase time), 2021 DETAIL

It’s an immense pleasure to be here sharing the work of Salua Ares, a brilliant artist and a dear friend. I first met Salua about six years ago, when I joined a study group led by Brazilian curator Eder Chiodetto — and from the very beginning, it was a joy to get to know her.

Beyond having an exceptional artistic practice, Salua possesses a sharp intellect, a wonderfully creative mind, and a deeply impressive sensitivity. She is someone of remarkable kindness and generosity, with a gentle presence that shines through in everything she does.

I have deep admiration for her and her work, and I truly hope you enjoy this glimpse into her practice — which is, without a doubt, something very special.

©Salua Ares, Alguma, família (A family), 2021 Photograph with inkjet print on Hahnemühle PhotoRag and golden frame

Salua Ares (São Paulo, 1984) is a visual artist with a background in Economics and Photography. Her artistic practice unfolds through hybrid processes that move between photography, video, installation, text, and object.

In 2023, she held her first solo exhibition at MIS São Paulo (Museu da Imagem e do Som), following the selection of her project AZINHAGA for the “NOVA FOTOGRAFIA” open call. The exhibited works became part of the museum’s collection.
Selected group exhibitions include: Lugar que se alimenta de tempo (Galeria Lica Pedrosa,

São Paulo, 2025); ATLAS (Canteiro, São Paulo, 2025); Neither Here Nor There (MIFA, Miami, 2025); A Deusa Linguagem (Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, 2023); Experimental Photography Festival Barcelona (2021); and Pequeno Encontro da Fotografia (Pernambuco, 2021). Between 2022 and 2023, she participated in the international artist residency ACHO (Campinas, São Paulo).

Instagram: @saluaares

©Salua Ares, Alguma família II (A family II), 2021 C-print with a chemical reaction from cement poured over it and a gold frame with passe-partout

Artist Statement

I have been developing my work through hybrid practices that unfold from photography. My interest lies in what becomes absent through gestures of erasure, and in what persists or is revealed within those absences. In this sense, I search for ways to respond to and resist the dynamics of contemporary life.

By exploring the frictions between past and present, memory and invention, the visible and the latent, I aim to open space for possible fabulations.

Words have become increasingly present in my practice, emerging through dialogues between text and image, or text and material.

My compositions remain sober and monochromatic, standing in contrast to the many forms of excess that shape our daily visual environment. – Salua Ares

©Salua Ares, Ares_Azinhaga_A place that held memories

What led you to work with photography and what keeps you connected to it?

Unlike many artists, photography entered my life much more as an event than a premeditated choice. My first degree was in Economics, in 2007, but it was only around 2015, almost by chance, that photography crossed my path. At the time, I felt professionally unfulfilled and had a strong desire to shift careers. I knew what I no longer wanted, but had no clarity about which direction to take.

As the daughter of a landscape designer, I have always had a special affection for plants and flowers, and as a hobby I often created floral arrangements for family gatherings and close friends. Someone suggested that I photograph these arrangements to build some sort of catalogue. But when I tried, I became frustrated with the low quality of the images, which didn’t match what I saw with the naked eye. I considered hiring a professional photographer, but remembered a dear client who worked in the field. We talked, exchanged ideas, and eventually agreed on a service exchange in which she gave me a quick workshop on photography, DSLR cameras, and the basics of shooting in manual mode.

That unexpected encounter awakened something in me. I took one workshop after another until I found myself enrolled in the photography program at Escola Panamericana de Arte in São Paulo. There, I fell in love with authorial photography and, later, with contemporary art. I graduated in 2017. In the beginning my work was quite traditional, but at a certain point the bidimensionality of the image no longer felt sufficient. I began exploring expanded photography and, little by little, my practice started moving also through video, installation, text, and object.

Despite the hybrid nature of my work today, photography remains my primary creative trigger. Even when a piece is ultimately resolved in another medium, it most likely originated from an image.

©Salua Ares , Azinhaga, From left to right: Fazia sol (Sunny day), 2021 Diptych with inkjet print on Hahnemühle PhotoRag

What motivates you to begin a new project?

My interest lies both in what disappears and in what resists or reveals within contemporary dynamics. My attention turns intuitively toward these questions, but ideas and inspirations emerge in different way… through my surroundings, personal experience or even literature.
The Azinhaga project, for instance, was born from José Saramago’s testimony, through an interview in which he said:
“My village was surrounded by olive groves, with ancient trees of huge trunks. They disappeared. I felt as if my childhood had been stolen from me. […] Returning to Azinhaga now is returning to another place that is no longer mine. We inhabit memory. The village where I was born exists only in my memory.”

His words moved me deeply. I was born and raised in São Paulo, a city increasingly shaped by an accelerated (and often violent) process of verticalization. Many of the landscapes of my childhood no longer exist, and this perception resonated immediately with Saramago’s Azinhaga. I developed the project thinking about this inseparable relationship between memory and space, and about the voids created by urban erasures. From appropriated images of families whose settings, much like Saramago’s, have been transformed, in this serie I explored at times the encounter and at times the confrontation between memory and matter, moving through various strategies such as the juxtaposition of scenes of affection and of implosions, visual parallels between stacked concrete blocks and recollections of the past, and physical experiments between the photographic support and cement.

Telas Luminosas, on the other hand, emerged from a personal reflection on the huge flood of information to which we are exposed minute by minute. Through the dialogue between video and image, I propose a reflection on the informational excesses of contemporary life. In the video, the tedious repetition of a particular message ends up nullifying it. And in that symptom, I find a way to transmute empty content into significant form. From the erasures produced by excess, I seek to reveal new lights.

In the works Oceano de cem milhões de ondas and De tudo que escorre, resta o gesto, in turn, I investigate the very skin of paper to create an interval, a pause, between representation, the real, and the imaginary. Whether through the tearing of discarded photographs or through the gesture of peeling an image printed on cotton paper, I generate images that overflow beyond their own bidimensionality.

©Salua Ares, From left to right: Fazia sol (Sunny day), 2021 Diptych with inkjet print on Hahnemühle PhotoRag Antes do sopro (Before the blow), 2021 Diptych with inkjet print on Hahnemühle PhotoRag

©Salua Ares, Antes do sopro (Before the blow), 2021 DETAIL

You expand the traditional concept of photography by incorporating text and three-dimensionality into your pieces. Could you tell us a bit about this process?

As I mentioned earlier, at a certain point in my trajectory, traditional photography no longer seemed to hold what I wanted to express. I felt an increasing desire to expand it, and as I allowed that expansion to happen, the work gained new strength.

Text became part of this opening. I have always enjoyed writing, and even in my early pieces, the word already tried to find its way in, whether through titles or small textual fragments that structured the chapters of my first photobook project.

Today, text has become increasingly present, whether in dialogue with the image or with the materiality of the work itself.

I can also recognize that my compositions — sober and monochromatic, as a counterpoint to the excesses we are exposed to daily — carry a horizontal gesture that belongs to the realm of writing as well.

©Salua Ares, From left to right: Nuvens (Clouds), 2021 Triptych with inkjet print on Hahnemühle PhotoRag

©Salua Ares, Entre camadas (Layers), 2021 Poliptych with inkjet print on Hahnemühle PhotoRag

De tudo que escorre, resta o gesto (Of all that drips, the gesture remains)/ TELAS LUMINOSAS

©Salua Ares, De tudo que escorre, resta o gesto (Of all that drips, the gesture remains) De tudo que escorre, resta o gesto (Of all that drips, the gesture remains), 2025 Print on Hahnemühle Rice paper roll and later manually distressed

©Salua Ares, De tudo que escorre, resta o gesto (Of all that drips, the gesture remains), 2025 DETAIL

©Salua Ares, Telas Luminosas (Luminous Screens), 2022
Video, 1’1” and photograph with inkjet print on Hahnemühle Baryta
51x65x4 cm

©Salua Ares, Telas Luminosas (Luminous Screens), 2022
DETAIL