ɅV: RAFA ESPARZA & MARIA MAEA
About ɅV: Rafa Esparza & Maria Maea
Curator: Sacha Craddock
Curatorial cycle: Attention
June 7 – September 6, 2026
Plataforma, Guadalajara, Mexico
ɅV brings together at Plataforma for the first time a collaborative work by American artist Rafa Esparza and artist and maker Maria Maea. Both artists develop practices deeply connected to questions about manual labor, assemblage, and the construction of context where sculpture, installation, and collective experience intertwine.
Rafa Esparza is internationally recognized for his use of performance, collective action as well as traditional construction material in order to set up dialogues around identity, migration, and the urban space. Esparza has exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, and Museo Jumex. Maria Maea’s sculptural works with weaving and sound investigate process where material assemblage can connect to the body, memory, and communal experience.
The exhibition takes as its point of departure the area that surround the Los Angeles River basin: these ambiguous territories provide situations in which rest, transit, precarity, and refuge do converge. Conceived specifically for the space at Plataforma, the exhibition generously offers shared experience, while touching on sensitivities to belonging, vulnerability, and a collective way of inhabiting public space.
About the curator:
Sacha Craddock is a British art critic, writer, and curator widely recognized for her extensive trajectory in contemporary art. She has played a key role in platforms and institutions such as New Contemporaries, Bloomberg Space, and AICA-UK, while also supporting initiatives including ArtSchool Palestine and the British School at Rome Contemporary Art Award. Her curatorial and critical practice has focused on supporting contemporary artists and developing international exhibitions across the United Kingdom, Europe, and the Middle East.
About the curatorial cycle Attention
Over the course of a year, British curator and writer Sacha Craddock developed at Plataforma a curatorial cycle structured around an ongoing inquiry into attention, presence, and the ways we relate to images, materials, and contemporary space. Rather than proposing a fixed theme, the four exhibitions functioned as variations on a shared investigation: how to look, inhabit, and construct meaning within a context marked by acceleration, visual saturation, and uncertainty.
Through different languages — photography, painting, sculpture, installation, and collaborative processes — the cycle brought together artists whose practices share an interest in what remains latent: material memory, in-between spaces, visible and invisible systems of production, and the tensions between individual and collective experience. From the observation of the fleeting moment and the everyday archive in Here, Now, to notions of community, precarity, and shared construction in AV, the exhibitions proposed direct encounters with works that embrace both process and vulnerability.
Craddock’s curatorial research also insisted on blurring hierarchies between disciplines, materials, and modes of making, privileging practices in which manual labor, collaboration, and physical experience operate as ways of thinking through the present. Throughout the cycle, the exhibitions constructed a trajectory in which the exhibition space ceased to function solely as a container for artworks and instead became a site of coexistence, tension, and shared attention.
