Alejandra Dorado

Alejandra Dorado (born September 24, 1969) is considered to be one of the most important contemporary artists working in Bolivia. Dorado's work—especially her installations and performances—focuses on identity, gender and power relations. It often involves dense layers of meaning and perspectives ranging from the conceptual intellectualization of topics and processes extracted out of everyday life and Latin American and Western society, to the playful yet critical deconstruction of conventions.

Personal life

She was born María Alejandra Dorado Cámara, on September 24, 1969. Dorado is a native of Cochabamba, Bolivia, and majored in Fine Arts, with a minor in painting, at ARCIS (University of Art and Social Sciences) in Santiago, Chile. She currently teaches Drawing and Techniques in the Graphic Design Program of the Bolivian Private University, and has started an innovative program for art education for the blind.

Art work

A prolific artist, Alejandra Dorado is known mainly for her finely executed installations contrived around topics such as gender, performativity, power relations and identity (de)construction. Highly conceptual in nature, her installations are often inspired from works of literature and philosophy, history and gender theory.

Representative work

In LASALASDELUCRECIA (an installation inspired on the legendary figure in the history of the Roman Republic. The title may mean Lucretia's Wings, or Lucrecia's Halls), she portrays the same image of herself in seven different modes of representation (oil painting, stenciling, embroidery, etc.) as Lucretia, holding a dagger against her naked chest. Her facial expression is highly ambiguous, since it can be understood, at first glance, as emotionless; however, through repetition and the playful exaggerated arrangement and inclusion of items such as feathers, candles, within the installation it can be seen as a pose, a deadpan form of delivering an acerbic yet darkly humorous critique on the discourse of female victimization and convenient voluntary disempowerment.^[1][2]

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