Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules is the first major retrospective dedicated to internationally acclaimed photographer Alejandro Cartagena, born in the Dominican Republic and based in Monterrey, Mexico. The exhibition brings together more than two decades of work through an expansive, multi-series presentation, highlighting a practice that spans documentary photography, collage, appropriated vernacular imagery, and AI-generated video.
The exhibition underscores the artist’s sustained engagement with some of the most pressing social and environmental issues of our time: suburban sprawl, the US–Mexico border, economic inequality, and the transformation of urban landscapes. Rooted in the Mexican context yet resonating globally, his photographs interrogate the political, economic, and cultural systems that shape life in the twenty-first century.
Organized chronologically, the exhibition traces the evolution of his perspective. The opening galleries present earlier, more introspective projects, including the series Masks, composed of thirteen self-portraits reflecting the multiple names and identities attributed to the artist throughout his migratory journey. Questions of belonging and self-definition run throughout the exhibition, foregrounding the tension between place and personhood.
Significant attention is devoted to the bodies of work that established his international reputation, including Carpoolers, which focuses on workers transported in the beds of pickup trucks across expanding suburban territories, and Border Camera, created from stills captured by US government surveillance cameras along the border. In these series, seriality replaces the notion of the decisive moment: meaning emerges through accumulation and repetition, offering a structural reading of social phenomena rather than a single iconic instant.
A substantial section is dedicated to his projects examining the ideology of homeownership, including A Small Guide to Homeownership: Case Study, Mexico, conceived in the format of a familiar how-to guide in order to critically unpack the bureaucratic, infrastructural, and social dimensions of contemporary housing. Through multiple vantage points—transportation, labor, ecology, and family life—the artist constructs what he has described as a documentary cubist perspective, in which a subject is examined simultaneously from different angles.
The final galleries present recent works developed through archival materials, cutouts, and artificial intelligence tools. Here, the artist reactivates images collected over the years, questioning the notion of photographic truth and opening new inquiries into authorship in the age of generative technologies. The exhibition concludes with AI-generated portraits, forming a conceptual dialogue with the self-portraits at the beginning: from the search for his own identity to a reflection on how a machine interprets the faces and identities of others.
Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules is conceived as a map of the artist’s trajectory, marked by oscillations between conviction and doubt, certainty and inquiry. At the same time, the exhibition serves as a gateway into contemporary Latin America—an environment defined by flux, improvisation, resilience, and unfinished transformation.