Armando Andrade Tudela

Armando Andrade Tudela born 1975, Lima, Peru. Lives and works in Saint Etienne, France and Berlin.

Armando Andrade Tudela explores the intersecting interfaces between popular culture, politics and fine art. While frequently using the South American cultural and historical context as his starting point, on a deeper level Andrade Tudela’s work focuses on complex systems of translation and transference; how are aesthetic ideas assimilated and reactivated politically, or socially, at a local level? And more broadly speaking, how are ideas themselves embedded within the fabric of geography and physical topography?

Andrade Tudela moves freely among a wide range of media and material, such as photography and video, sculpture, drawing, installation, while also regularly incorporating elements of craft and design in his work. In his in-depth, research-driven projects, he frequently employs quasi-documentary techniques, such as recorded interviews and on-site photographic explorations, combining them with multiple references to history, politics and popular culture. At the same time, his drawings and objects combine visual directness and technical accomplishment with conceptual complexity.

This characteristic layering and accumulation of references in Andrade Tudela’s does not amass and solidify into clear-cut historical interpretations or commentaries. Instead, by focusing on sites of temporal and geographic slippage, Andrade Tudela parses the hidden inner rhymes and subtle discordances within cultural history, ultimately undermining and even dismantling the cultural and historic framing structures his work examines.