ANDRÉS SENRA
SAFE SPACE
February 11 – March 13, 2026
Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, SUNY Old Westbury
Opening Reception: Wednesday, February 11, 2026, 4:00 – 7:00 pm
Workshop Program: Thursday, February 26, 2:40 pm – 4:20 pm
The Amelie A. Wallace Gallery at SUNY Old Westbury is pleased to present Safe Space, a major retrospective of work by Spanish artist Andrés Senra, on view from February 11 through March 13, 2026. Bringing together projects developed over the past two decades in Madrid, Berlin, and New York, the exhibition traces the evolution of Senra’s practice across shifting political climates, social struggles, and personal histories.
Safe Space is the title of Senra’s most recent project, created in a moment marked by the global rise of far-right movements and increasing threats to the lives and rights of LGBTQ+ communities. Moving between past and present, the exhibition re-reads earlier works through the urgency of today, revealing a practice consistently shaped by resistance, care, visibility, and survival.
Spanning the 1990s to the present, the exhibition features film, large-scale projections, hanging fabric works, works-on-paper, and paintings. Together, these pieces transform the Wallace Gallery into a kaleidoscopic maximalist environment that reflects the multiplicity of Senra’s artistic and political commitments.
Senra’s practice emerges from Queer activism in Madrid during the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1990s, where documentation, visibility, and resistance formed the foundation of his work. From these beginnings, his practice expanded toward more autobiographical and self-referential narratives that explore gay identity, desire, vulnerability, and belonging. Over time, this personal lens widened into socially engaged projects that reclaim public space through symbolic monuments and collective actions. Works such as Rosa Winkel and Pedestal for Dissidents confront historical erasure, while Performing City addresses precarity under late capitalism. Hypervisibility recurs in Senra’s work, exemplified by large-scale interventions such as We Are Here, We Are Queer on the monumental screens of Madrid’s Callao Square.
Alongside these public gestures, Senra sustains a deep engagement with utopia—its failures, contradictions, and transformative potential—through projects that document alternative communities as well as speculative worlds grounded in care, radical democracy, shared economies, and social justice, most notably in Queering Utopia. Several works also reflect on institutional, state, and police violence using the visual language of history painting. Projects such as Real Events situate queer and dissident bodies within broader political histories, questioning who is permitted to appear in official narratives, while works including Post-Trauma and Burned House foreground mental health, psychic fragility, and the emotional cost of structural violence and exclusion.
Senra’s political and emotional intensity is complemented by a poetic and speculative dimension. A series of pastel paintings presents imagined portraits of philosophers, cultural figures, and pop icons—ranging from Foucault and Simone de Beauvoir to Britney Spears—situated in symbolic, dreamlike scenarios that resist rational explanation. In We Were Never Human, developed from Alliances of Care and Desire, Senra queers identity beyond gender binaries and challenges Western dualisms separation of the human from the non-human, proposing relational and non-hierarchical ways of coexisting. His engagement with ecological collapse appears in works such as Dana, where the contemporary landscape becomes an archive of climate violence and loss. Speculative fiction and artificial intelligence shape projects such as the triple-screen Nexus, which reimagines Blade Runner with artists as replicants, and the AI-driven dialogue in Queering Utopia, where artificial intelligence emerges as a new Other, echoing historical patterns of exploitation and exclusion while posing questions about future forms of life and care.
Public Program
Andrés Senra will lead a participatory workshop focused on creative processes, care, and empowerment. Students will create small art objects conceived as protective amulets and talismans, as well as short empowerment-based videos designed as digital icons to carry on their mobile devices. The workshop will encourage reflection on self-care, community, and art as a tool for critical expression.
The exhibition and workshop program are co-sponsored by El Conuco, the Latinx and Ibero-American Center, and the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Center at SUNY Old Westbury.
Artist Biography
Andrés Senra is an artist, filmmaker, curator, and educator. He holds a PhD in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Theory of Art (cum laude). His multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, drawing, photography, video, installation, and performance engages with Queer subjectivities, activism, memory, mental health, utopia, and the politics of representation.
Senra’s work has been presented internationally at major museums, universities, and cultural institutions, including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and CA2M (Madrid), Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires), Matadero Madrid, Art Center Nabi (Seoul), Hosek Contemporary (Berlin), Stephen Street Gallery (New York), Princeton University, Harvard University, Union Docs (New York), Flux Factory (New York), Culture Lab LIC, BAAD! Bronx, and Interior Beauty Salon (New York).
Senra has received numerous awards, grants, and residencies, including the Community of Practice Thematic Residency Award at the Santa Fe Art Institute (2025), the NYFA / New York Foundation for the Arts – Queens Arts Fund Grant (2023), and the LMCC Arts Center Residency at Governors Island (2023). In Spain, he has been awarded the Ministry of Culture Fellowship for Artistic Research, Creation, and Production (2020) and the Community of Madrid Visual Arts Creation Grant (2021). His work has been featured at major international events such as BienalSur (2023) and the San Sebastián de los Reyes Contemporary Art Biennial (2025).
Senra teaches visual arts, critical theory, and artistic research. His work moves fluidly between art, academia, and activism, situating Queer experience at the center of contemporary cultural and political debate.
An Opening reception for Safe Space: Andrés Senra is scheduled for Wednesday, February 11, 4:00 –7:00 pm. A workshop is scheduled for Thursday, February 26, 2:40 – 4:20 pm.
The exhibition is organized by Hyewon Yi, Director, Amelie A. Wallace Gallery.
ANDRÉS SENRA
SAFE SPACE
Workshop
Public Program:
Thursday, February 26, 2:40 pm – 4:20 pm
In conjunction with the solo exhibition Safe Space at the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, artist Andrés Senra will lead a participatory workshop exploring creative process, care, and empowerment. Students will create small art objects conceived as protective amulets or talismans, along with short empowerment-focused videos designed as digital icons for their mobile devices. The workshop encourages reflection on self-care, community, and art as a tool for critical expression.
Location:
Amelie A. Wallace Gallery
Campus Center, Main Level
SUNY Old Westbury
Route 107, Old Westbury, NY 11568
Workshop Photos
