Susana Pilar — Galleria Continua, Paris
At Galleria Continua, artist Susana Pilar gives form, in a striking silence, to the accumulated pain of peoples marked by oppression, domination, and erasure. Her work moves across eras and territories to question the systemic violence these populations have endured and whose traces persist to this day.
Titled Not Alone, the exhibition unfolds as both a retrospective and introspective journey. From the outset, a scar carved into the wall traces a symbolic timeline, announcing the exhibition’s grave and engaged tone. Around fifteen works, employing a wide range of media (performances, sculptures, videos, drawings, installations, photographs, and paintings) compose a fragmented yet coherent narrative, structured around themes of gender domination, racial discrimination, exile, and individual trajectories embedded within a collective history.
The exhibition operates as a sensitive kaleidoscope, alternating moments of empathy with more confrontational, sometimes violent gestures. Susana Pilar weaves together testimony, revolt, attempts at repair, and reinvention. Several works, created specifically for this presentation, establish a close dialogue between the artist’s personal memory and global history. The gallery spaces thus become sites of reflection, shaped by visual experiences, intimate gestures, and critical positions.
While the artist reveals how violence and domination recur across time and continents, she rejects any notion of inevitability. Not Alone is also a space of resistance. By revisiting dark episodes of history, Susana Pilar sketches strategies of survival, ways of diverting fear, and paths toward emancipation. The exhibition’s title resonates as a double message: a lucid assessment and a call for solidarity. No victim stands alone in the face of systemic violence.
Pilar multiplies her approaches and continually renews her forms, giving each series its own tone and visual language. This diversity sustains a deeply experimental practice in which image, sound, speech, and at times silence all contribute to a single narrative. By staging violence in order to confront and dispel it, Susana Pilar moves beyond individual experience to articulate a collective reflection.
At the heart of this work lies the body, marked, tested, bearing stigmas, yet also a site of transmission and resistance. Through it, the artist has developed, over nearly fifteen years, a body of work that interrogates the legacy of domination and the ways in which stories are passed on, transformed, and reclaimed.
Harsh and uncompromising, yet profoundly sincere, Susana Pilar’s practice draws its strength from an assumed fragility. Not Alone is a demanding but essential exhibition, reminding us that memory, when shared, can become a tool for repair.
Susana Pilar, Not Alone — Galleria Continua, Paris, Le Marais, from January 16th to March 10th, 2026, 87 rue du Temple, 75003 Paris
