Monica Alcazar-Duarte is a Mexican-British multi-disciplinary visual artist, whose work acknowledges her indigenous heritage while exploring current ideals of progress. Her work references Western society’s obsession with speed, expansion, and resource accumulation as an index of advancement, at a time in which ecological disaster looms. It considers other ways of seeing, knowing, and being in the world.
She embraces themes related to science and technology and their influence over society and the natural world. In her projects she mixes images and new technologies, such as Augmented Reality, to create multi-layered work, producing meaning through seemingly disconnected narratives. Monica’s work has been exhibited and collected throughout Europe, Mexico and the United States.
"We live in a in a post-colonial society. So for example, every time I come back to the country, there are a series of signs that come to the surface of my skin, in almost a hurtful way. And that is in that every person that I see, for example, in advertising or TV, is aspirational. And they look very European, and usually they're kind of light skin, and their features have nothing or almost nothing to do with 90% of the population in the country. And I find that shocking, that it is still very accepted."
