Felipe Romero Beltrán

Felipe Romero Beltrán. Bravo

Curated by Tim Clark.

Bravo situates itself in the liminal space of the Río Bravo, a territory marked by migration where geography and identity collide. Focusing on a 270-kilometre stretch of the river, Romero Beltrán constructs an elusive visual narrative in which the river becomes a silent protagonist, shaping lives while remaining largely absent from view.

Through portraits, interiors, and landscapes, Bravo captures the suspended time of migration. Romero Beltrán’s precise visual language articulates a political reality in which meticulously staged portraiture both reveals and conceals resilience. Everyday objects within the interiors, a speaker, a mattress, a red-painted table, acquire symbolic weight, reflecting conditions of precarity and control.

Structured in three chapters, Endings, Bodies, and Breaches, the project challenges systems of classification, enclosure, and identification that govern border regimes. The audiovisual work El Cruce further emphasizes the river’s dual role as both life source and militarized boundary, intertwining scenes of baptism, fishing, and migrant testimony. With accompanying texts and an interview with the artist, Bravo emerges as a poetic yet urgent meditation on a border defined by contradiction, where hope and despair, movement and stasis coexist.