​

STUDIO LENCA

b.1986, El Salvador

Currently lives and works in Margate, UK

​

Studio Lenca is a contemporary artist from El Salvador now living and working in the UK ‘Studio’ refers to a space for experimentation and making; ‘Lenca’ are the indigenous people of southwestern Honduras and eastern El Salvador.

 

Studio Lenca fled to the USA as a consequence of El Salvador’s violent civil war. Travelling overland with his mother, the family lived undocumented in San Francisco. ‘El Baile’ (‘The Dance’ in English) is the result of a continued investigation into his own immigrant history and that of the wider displaced community.

 

Before becoming an artist, Studio Lenca was a professional dancer. The transformative and transgressive nature of this experience is celebrated in this show. Dance is transitory – it emerges in a moment, disorienting us from our location, our histories and accepted forms of knowledge. Dance is an opportunity to explore movement in place (Deleuze, 1998, 65).

 

‘Being a dancer taught me about freedom and what it felt like to be an artist.’ - Studio Lenca

 

Studio Lenca’s colour drenched paintings explore the expansive and unknowable inner worlds of the figures they depict. In these works ambiguity becomes a form of agency and resistance. We’re unsure if the figures are dancing or running, at home or lost in a ‘foreign’ landscape. The works refuse to be constrained by external presumptions or expectations, transporting us to a liminal space where our understanding of the immigrant experience is re-oriented.

 

As the figures dance and take up space, biographical anecdotes, personal reflections and folkloric iconography blend. Visual elements and materials are recalibrated to reclaim autonomy over fragmented histories. Through his unique sense of belonging and joy, Studio Lenca defies the imposed narratives surrounding forced migration, inviting us to join his dance of joy and visibility.