Presence as Promise.
Ernesto Bautista

Presence as Promise is the first institutional exhibition to gather the filmmaker, poet, and visual artist Ernesto Bautista’s seventeen-year trajectory. Born in El Salvador in 1987, Bautista’s work contends with the systemic violence that has devastated his country since the Civil War (1979-1992), and whose consequences continue to reverberate through the Salvadoran present, such as the proliferation of gangs or maras, the migration of more than 25% of the country’s population, and the rise of far right phenomenons such as the government of Nayib Bukele. His work, deeply multidisciplinary and poetic, constitutes one of the most promising emerging trajectories in Central American art.

The exhibition unfolds via the three principal concerns that articulate Bautista’s practice: “literary projects with visual applications,” in which the artist’s poetry appropriates public and visual space; long and short films in which he explores the scars of war and the period of postconflict in El Salvador through a narrative perspective; and finally, his sculptural and installation works, among them, Fisher [Pescador], a monumental net made entirely from rosaries and commissioned specifically for the Museum’s space.

From the outset, the title, Presence as Promise, establishes Bautista’s singular poetics. With this phrase, he evokes the fragile state of life in his country which, far from constituting a de facto condition, is rendered as a promise that is broken everyday. Although this precarious ontological situation—which is to say, that of existence— amply resonates with what is experienced in Colombia, beyond establishing historical parallels, Bautista’s practice seeks to produce an “emotional translation” of life amid a kind of violence that forecloses the very idea of the future.

But his approach doesn’t dwell in hopelessness. While he employs shocking images that recall war—skulls, bullets, and blood—and others, which in Latin American continue to be associated with repression—the Church, the prayer, the confession—his intention is to mobilize the “signs that inhabit our collective experience,” to penetrate this violent imaginary, and to open space for new possibilities of existence.

If Presence as Promise appears somber at first sight, it is also charged with a poetic beauty that appeals to both spiritual resistance and to finding hope through the resignification of everyday images which, like fire, illuminate the path to renewal after destruction.

About Ernesto Bautista

Ernesto Bautista is a Salvadoran interdisciplinary visual artist, filmmaker, and writer (b. 1987, Santa Ana, El Salvador). His artistic practice focuses on traumatic historical memory, social scars, and fractured identities within the context of El Salvador’spostwar period, structural violence, and diaspora in El Salvador and Central America. Through a personal and collective archaeology, the recurring use of fire as a symbolic element, and the convergence of cinematic and spatial languages, Bautista explores the enduring consequences of armed conflict and their resonance in the present. His work addresses themes such as grief, collective forgetting, spiritual resistance, and the search for redemption.

Address Calle 24 #6-00, Bogotá, Colombia

Opening Hours

Tuesday to Saturday: 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. Last admission: 5:15 p.m.
Sundays and public holidays: 12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Last admission: 4:15 p.m.
* Closed on Mondays and on Tuesdays following a public holiday.

For further information:

Amalia López Siegert
Communications Coordinator, MAMBO
coordinacion.comunicaciones@mambogota.com
(+57) 318 838 0149

Estefanía Otavo
Communications Assistant, MAMBO
comunicaciones@mambogota.com
(+57) 305 738 7471