Exhibition Review: Paulina Avila’s “Entre Los Fragmentos”

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Exhibition Review: Paulina Avila’s “Entre Los Fragmentos”

June 2nd, 2025 by fstop

Review by Sofia Quintero

In a world increasingly defined by movement—voluntary and forced, temporary and permanent—the question of what constitutes “home” has never been more urgent. Paulina Avila’s solo exhibition “Entre los Fragmentos,” curated by Valeria Servín at 88 Eldridge St. in New York City, offers a deeply personal yet universal story, presenting two bodies of work that explore the spaces between departure and arrival, memory and present.

Born and raised in Mexico City and now based in New York, Avila embodies the very duality her work explores. “I often return to the artists and art of my city and country — there’s something incredibly poetic about how each interprets a place I’ve known my whole life,” she says. Her exhibition, featuring the series “Entre Dos” and “La Memoria de las Paredes,” developed during her time at Parsons School of Design, transforms individual experience into collective reflection through the lens of conceptual photography, documentary work, and experimental video. Through these works, she explores themes of nostalgia and the meaning of home, connecting personal stories from her family and community to broader collective contexts.

installation view

Drawing inspiration from Chris Marker’s seminal “La Jetée”, Avila crafts her own photographic poem about departure. The deliberate choice of black and white photography serves not merely as aesthetic homage but as a temporal device, collapsing past and present into the eternal now of memory.

Where “Entre Dos” explores the external journey of home, “La Memoria de las Paredes” turns inward. This series places Avila’s grandfather’s archival material in dialogue with her own photographic work to reconstruct fragments of family stories across generations and the walls that make up their home. Avila’s work signals her awareness that contemporary experience is fundamentally fragmented. This approach feels particularly relevant, when traditional notions of home, nation, and belonging are constantly changing.

“It means so much that I have been able to present my work recently both back in Mexico and now in New York and share it with people who have shaped the project, family and friends but also getting to share it with new people and being able to continue sharing my work and getting to have conversations around it has been very meaningful,” she shares.

installation view

installation view

Location: New York, New York City Type: Black and White, Exhibition

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