Blood Performances

Galería Gabriela Mistral Presents “Blood Performance” by Kütral Vargas
Huaiquimilla

The exhibition by the Mapuche artist from Valdivia, Chile, opened March 6 and runs
through April 18, 2026. Drawing on her lived experience with HIV, Vargas Huaiquimilla
transforms the gallery into an exposed body a meditation on dignity, pharmacology, and the future of lives lived under diagnosis.

Galería Gabriela Mistral is proud to open its 2026 exhibition season with Blood
Performance, a major new exhibition by Kütral Vargas Huaiquimilla; visual artist, writer,
and Mapuche performer based in Valdivia, Chile. The exhibition was inaugured on
March 6 at 19:00 hrs and is on view through April 18, 2026. Free admission.
 

Unfolding across seven stations comprising installations, sculptures, printed graphics,
and video-performances, the exhibition stages an intimate reckoning with life under HIV. It is at once a political gesture and a poetic proposition: that a body in treatment is not a body defined by shame, but by history, love, and the possibility of a future.

The work emerges from an interdisciplinary investigation that weaves together poetry,
narrative, performance, pharmacology, embroidery, digital technologies, and industrial
materials. The exhibition enters into direct dialogue with pressing debates in public
health: sexual education, health rights and dignity, mental health, and the social
memory of HIV. Among the materials employed: 160 bottles of antiretroviral medication
(TARV), 11,673 3D-printed pill replicas, 84 resin-cast pills, clocks, and carbon arrows,
objects that carry the weight of clinical routine and transform it into visual language.

“Although this exhibition begins with HIV, we all have a body, one that coexists
with pharmacology, chronic illness (diabetes, cancer, hepatitis, autoimmune
conditions), prolonged medicalization, processes of bodily transition (hormones,
surgeries, ongoing treatments), invisible or stigmatized pain.”
— Kütral Vargas Huaiquimilla

Blood Performance has its origin in the artist’s novel of the same title, published in
2024, which constitutes one of the most significant literary contributions to emerge from contemporary Chilean writing on the body, illness, and Indigenous identity. The
exhibition extends this narrative into physical space, proposing an emotional and
immersive journey through which the gallery itself becomes a body open, medicated
and alive.

A central commitment of the exhibition is accessibility and public mediation. Visitors are invited to actively engage with purpose-built devices, activated through guided
exercises by the gallery’s team and invited collaborators expanding the reach of the
work beyond spectatorship into shared experience.
 

“I would like to convey that this exhibition proposes a turn away from pain and
the alienating experiences of illness. It is a position on life in general and on life
with HIV as a space where love, dignity, dreaming, and the future are possible. It is an invitation to imagine a more just and less violent memory, where the sick
body is not synonymous with shame, but with history.
— Kütral Vargas Huaiquimilla

About the Artist
Kütral Vargas Huaiquimilla lives and works in Valdivia, Chile. A visual artist, writer, and
Mapuche performer, her practice develops an anticolonial artistic inquiry with a rigorous, contemporary engagement with Mapuche culture. She is the author of Performance de la Sangre (2024), Factory (2016), and La edad de los árboles (2017). She is the recipient of the Premio Arte y Cultura Región de Los Lagos (2017) and holds Honorable Mentions in Public Art at the Premio Municipal Arte Joven (2024 & 2025). She was a Fellow at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York (2024–25). Her work has been
presented across Chile, Latin America, and the United States. She is currently
represented by Judas Galería, Chile.