Image: Antonio Peña, Untitled, 2026 (detail). © Antonio Peña
The Kunsthaus Dahlem in Berlin will open "Antonio Peña – Wie Bilder uns lesen" ("How Images Read Us"), a cabinet exhibition by the Mexican artist Antonio Peña, on the evening of 22 October 2026. The presentation runs from 23 October to 23 November and is curated by Gloria Freiler, a curatorial trainee at the museum, with support from the museum's friends' association.
Peña is an Afro-Indigenous artist, curator and cultural manager from Oaxaca who works with drawing, installation and textile techniques. Alongside his own practice he works in museums and exhibitions, heading exhibition design at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo y de las Culturas Oaxaqueñas (MACCO). According to the Kunsthaus Dahlem, his work deals with the historical origins of violence and their social consequences.
Starting from his own Afro-Indigenous background, the drawings on view examine how Black and Indigenous people are made visible in Mexico. Peña takes up motifs from racist depictions, exaggerating and distorting them, and uses humour and irony to expose the contradictions and constructed nature of such attributions. The works, the museum explains, show how images sort people into categories and reduce them to a few features, and how these ideas derive from historical visual traditions rather than being self-evident.
The presentation is conceived as a dialogue with the museum's exhibition "Eva Frankfurther – Das Leben malen", which opens at the same time. Frankfurther, born in Berlin-Dahlem in 1930 and trained at St Martin's School of Art in London, painted immigrants, workers and residents of London's East End. In the museum's framing, she portrayed people in their individuality beyond social attributions, while Peña investigates the image worlds in which such attributions are created and passed on, adding a contemporary perspective to her work.
