La Montaña Sagrada at ARTBO 2026 with Sorondo Projects

September 23–27, 2026 · Bogotá, Colombia

This week, works from my ongoing series La Montaña Sagrada are on view at ARTBO with Sorondo Projects, as part of a presentation exploring landscape, memory, and perception.

Autana

2026

Oil pigment stick and medium on pigmented inkjet print

mounted on forex.

60×42 cm

For the Piaroa (Uwottüja) people of Venezuela, Autana is a sacred mountain. They call it Wahari-Kuawai, “the sacred tree of the fruits of the world.” According to their cosmology, the mountain is what remains of the great tree whose fruits gave rise to the abundance of the Amazon rainforest.

My first encounter with Autana was in Venezuela, as part of a landscape I could experience directly. Today, I return to it from a distance, through a photograph by Alfredo Boulton published in the 1953 book Tierra Venezolana by Arturo Uslar Pietri.

Born in Venezuela to Korean immigrant parents, I have lived outside the country for the past ten years. Distance has transformed my relationship with the places I left behind, as well as the way I understand them. As R. Indira Valentina Réquiz Molina (@rainvare) writes, “the land where we are born and the stories we inherit from those who are no longer with us are the foundations upon which we build our identity.” Her reflections on land, memory, and Venezuelan Indigenous myths resonate with my own experience of displacement and with the need, as part of the Venezuelan diaspora, to return to certain landscapes and ask what remains of them within us when we no longer inhabit them—particularly when the images and news that reach us from afar speak so often of loss and destruction.

The work begins with an existing image, which I intervene in with layers of oil pigment that conceal and reveal, allowing certain areas to remain visible while others disappear. Through this process, the mountain moves away from direct experience and enters the realm of memory.

Distance changes the places we leave behind. For me, it has meant reinterpreting them, giving them new meanings and, paradoxically, making them more present than they were when I was close to them. Returning to these landscapes, reclaiming and preserving them through memory, is also a form of resistance in the face of the destruction of my country.

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  Autana, 2026

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  Installation view of 'La Montaña Sagrada'

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  Canaima, 2026

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  Canaima, 2026

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  Installation view ARTBO 2026 Sorondo Projects

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  Installation view ARTBO 2026 Sorondo Projects

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  Installation view, Canaima

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  Juliana Sorondo with visitor

A place to pause at the fair

At ARTBO, my work is presented alongside paintings by Paula Cabral Muchacho, whose soothing palette and relationship with nature offer a different approach to landscape.

The dialogue between our works asks for time. It invites viewers to slow down and consider how two artists can approach landscape through different processes and arrive at distinct ways of experiencing it.

In my work, layers of oil pigment unsettle the photographic image, creating a tension between what was captured, what is remembered, and what is perceived. Cabral Muchacho approaches landscape through gesture and abstraction, allowing the sensation of a place to emerge without depending on direct representation.

Together, the works move between recognition and abstraction, presence and memory. Landscape becomes more than a physical territory: it becomes a space where identity, memory, and perception continually take shape.

If you’re in Bogotá this week, you can see the presentation at Sorondo Projects, booth D4, “Galerías 12,” at ARTBO, September 23–27, 2026.

For more information about the works, visit Sorondo Projects at ARTBO or contact Juliana Sorondo at juliana@sorondoprojects.com