Liza Ambrossio’s art is inseparable from her life, mirroring her experiences as a woman of mixed ancestry born in a nation ruptured by devastating waves of gender-related killings and violence.

In this body of work, she chooses to convey the crisis of femicide in Mexico not from the dictatorial male gaze, but through the prisms of psychic illness, malady, and witchcraft.

A combination of found and constructed imagery approximates the realities and fantasies of how women’s bodies continue to be fetishised, ambushed, chastened and erased by the culture of patriarchy. At the same time, they seek to re-interpret the visual iconography of the witch, madness, and the accompanying social anxieties around women.

As a descendant from a long lineage of shamans, passed on exclusively from generation to generation of mothers and daughters, the subject of witchcraft used to be a source of secrecy and shame in Ambrossio’s childhood and adolescence. However with time and age, she now observes it with tenderness and views it as a kind of symbolic reaction and defence against a culture hostile to women, what she terms “female machismo”.

Doubling up as a psychic and physical journey flooded with disturbances, magic, trauma, dreams, and visions, these images resemble persecutory cases of ghosts in the form of unfinished stories, speaking strongly as well of Ambrossio’s background as a former news photographer in the crime beat. 

Curated by John Tung