Leyla Cárdenas

Leyla Cárdenas received her BA in Fine Arts from Los Andes University and her MFA from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).

Cárdenas installation, sculpture, mixed-media work delves into urban ruins and cities landscapes as indications of social transformation, loss and historical memory. Through subtractive processes that culminate in large-scale, delicate installations that render perceptible the elusive idea of time. From the decomposition of the physical and emotional fabric of the intervened spaces, discarded structures, archives and vestiges are used as material for her work from a sculptural strategy that draws from history, architecture and archeology.

Credit:Leyla Cárdenas




Eternal Return.Sublimation on partially unwoven polyester silk, reclaimed wooden beam, bronze.Variable dimensions.2025
Eternal Return is a site specific installation consisting of photographs dye-sublimated on polyester silk and then partially unweaved. The photos are installed as an immersive landscape/wallpaper in a corner of the space.The images are directly linked to the physicality of the space and in dialogue with a local “human altered” material fragment. Using the potential of the textile as medium, as conceptual framework and as the ideal resource to investigate through layers of time and space. Thinking the landscape as testimony of the cyclical destructive effect of industrialization and overexploitation of natural resources.
Just as the ruin implies the dissolution of solidity, a sublimation is the transition of a substance from the solid state to the vapor state. In the case of this works, the method of unweaving thread by thread, disrupts and questions the integrity of the depicted image while also follows a method that seems to reinforce the imminent disappearance of material traces. By using veil and transparency the images are held materially in a state of transition. The process of unweaving of the photograph has become an operative concept I mine, research and perform; considering the gesture as analog to a gathering from social, historical, architectural fragments in order to understand temporal structures. My practice interweaves disciplines as architecture and archaeology to open up a transversal view through the politics of time. In this juxtaposition of temporalities, emerges a defiance of the status of images, opening new thresholds of meaning. Proposing the cyclical nature of this relations as an -endless reweaving- of this relationship with the land.
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