The Aleph and Other Portals

June 7th – August 30/2025

Aluna Art Foundation (AAF) inaugurates its new headquarters in Little Havana with this exhibition inspired in The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges. The opening marks the beginning of an expansion of wide-reaching curatorial initiatives. This art space is part of Tower Space, a project conceived in collaboration with Barlington Group, which enhances the experience of contemporary art in this emblematic neighborhood.

The Aleph and Other Portals is a curatorial project shaped collectively with the artists Carola Bravo, Gretel Capriles, Agustín Di Luciano, Elfriede Fett-Crohare, Feco Hamburger, Kenzie Funk, Flor Godward, Andrés Michelena, Ronald Morán, Mario Rodríguez “Mareo”, and Gladys Triana. The show features documentation of a piece by Julieta Aranda. Sebastián Elizondo has made an intervention in the bathroom space—which fascinated Duchamp—using a urinal documentation and an animation derived from Eadweard Muybridge frames. Capriles, Di Luciano and Godward form part of the Tower Studios.

The exhibition is interwoven with The Aleph’s evocative meditation on the possibility of glimpsing the universe from the least expected places. Borges recounts the discovery of a small point where, with some discomfort from the strain of posture and concentrated gaze, it is possible to perceive“the place where all the places of the world are, without confusion, seen from every angle”, a tiny, iridescent sphere, which allows one to behold simultaneously the immeasurable space-time of all that exist, and to plunge into the contemplation of the boundless universe.

“The works  ─explain curators Adriana Herrera and Willy Castellanos─ assembled here contain their own “alephs” of vision: They contain portals of their own, placing us at the threshold of something that cannot be fully seen without effort —a threshold linked to the enduring questions, inviting us to enter gently, attentively, into the various universes created by the artists until we begin to sense their connection to what we most need to see. Thus, the curatorship is conceived as an exercise in self-reflection on the human gaze—revealing that the cosmos is also a landscape shaped by that gaze, and that it may likewise open a path toward inner vision.

Lines from The Aleph, inscribed on the walls, beckon the viewer to discover it —the Aleph itself— within the portals of the artworks, all in black and white except for the video installation Shabono by Carola Bravo. She sketches on the wall the circular, open hollow of the communal dwelling of the Yanomami and projects the sky from dawn to dusk, knowing, like Borges, that “in one day are all the days of time.”

Feco Hamburger’s work invites us to extend geographer Denis Cosgrove’s assertion that landscape is “a way of seeing” —shaped by cultural subjectivity— to photographs of sidereal space taken from Earth. His poetic interventions, whether in his own images of the cosmos or in found archives of the universe, made possible only after the 1940s, not only awaken an awareness of the elasticity of perception, but also offer glimpses of the ungraspable—through a renewed experience of the vast night sky that stretches far beyond us.

Mareo evokes the memory of the Andes mountain ranges, but also the abyssal spaces—geographical and emotional—and draws perception toward the interior of the fissure present in all things, transforming it into light. Agustín Di Luciano’s white lines float in the vastness of a black plane, like projections of forming universes that contain the potential of alternate realities. If M. C. Escher was marked by the theory of relativity and mathematical infinities, Di Luciano is a pioneering artist and inhabitant of the metaverse, capable of containing within the interior of a desk’s hollow the aerial view of Little Havana and the space of his own drawings. Michelena contains the universe in a table that is also a Zen garden, whose forms arise from the vectors of Parque del Este in Caracas and its landscapes once imagined by architect Burle-Marx. Kenzie Funk embeds a metallic sphere found in the edge of a white stone, anticipating all the changing faces that will be reflected in it.

The lesson in seeing to which Gretel Capriles’ work invites us is the dissolution of boundaries between the material contours of things and elements and the sensitive field of perception. Her eye can find the geometric structure of some form of infinity in the depths of an object as ordinary and yet as wondrous as a lamp. Gladys Triana has created alphabets for transcendence and has been able to capture the oscillation between the visible and the invisible, the final passage into the unknown, using fragments of small discarded objects. Elfriede Fett-Crohare’s work holds the instant of a vision that never left her: after having once seen the dance flight of the whirling dervishes, she began a series where—thanks to her extensive training in Chinese ink—she is able to trace, in endlessly unique variations, the circular image that precedes thought: the hand that erases time and experiences unity.

Ronald Morán, for his part, used the millennia-old legacy of sumi-e ink to confront the razor-wire fences that proliferate in Central America as widespread mechanisms of security—and as object-metonymies of confinement. He grasped their sharp points and transformed them into instantaneous, volatile black strokes, which, through ritual, gradually turned the barbs into organic or stellar forms, opening the place of all confinements to the vast space of transformation. Flor Godward, who invariably paints her subjects in childhood—where everything is potential and enigma, a territory where the future human condition is being formed—presents the only figurative work: a double portrait of Borges and the Minotaur, whom he called Asterion, in adolescence. In doing so, she perhaps suggests that the Aleph lies within the labyrinth of self-knowledge.

 The Aleph and Other Portals’ production was made possible with the support of Tower Hotel, The Barlington Group, DC Foundation, Janaina Torres Galeria, the 55Project, the Brazil-USA Cultural Center of Florida (CCBU) and 108 ArtProjects.