Exhibition
Gratuito, Moreno y Anticolonial

Opening: 19 September, 7–10pm
Exhibition period: 20 September – 9 November

 

Gratuito, Moreno y Anticolonial means ‘free, brown and anticolonial’, and is the slogan for the small, independent, artist-run space El Faro, situated in El Alto, Bolivia. Founded in 2024, El Faro is a collective investigation of what art can be, and what it can mean in a Bolivian context. It was created to support the formation of an art scene in El Alto – with a particular focus on brown and Indigenous artists – through a programme of workshops, events and exhibitions.

Artist Vicente Mollestad was selected through the UKS open call. He decided to channel the resources for the solo exhibition at UKS into the local art scene in Bolivia, where he was born and where he has spent the majority of his time for the last six years, including co-running El Faro with Cristal Melby and Fide Muñez. In September 2025, Mollestad and El Faro present a collective, mural-like work consisting of raw and untranslated material from the archive of the Bolivian exhibition space – materials that also resists appropriation.

As much a critical gesture as a clear and solid act of love, the exhibition asks what it means to translate, export and build community across global South and North, and how we might use our resources for political change.

 

About

Vicente Mollestad (b. 1987, Bolivia) was raised in Norway. He holds a BFA from the Faculty of Fine art, Music and Design, University of Bergen (UiB) and an MFA from the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, with studies at Korea National University of Arts, Seoul. His practice includes many media, including installation, painting, sound, text and performance. Mollestad currently co-runs El Faro in El Alto, where he also lives. The move to Bolivia has radically changed his artistic practice, which revolves thematically around the relationship between the West and the un-Western, migration, and the development of anti-colonial knowledge and strategies.

El Faro is an artist-run space founded in 2024 to support and grow El Alto’s art scene. Assuming a hyper-local perspective, El Faro’s work is grounded in Bolivia’s political situation, colonial history, local materials, and Indigenous knowledge and traditions. As a base for critical reflection, El Faro is a site to think through issues of appropriation and the inequities of the art scene, recognising that many (local) opportunities are often reserved for those who come from privilege. El Faro is currently the only independent space dedicated to so-called ‘contemporary art’ in a city of more than 885,000 inhabitants.