Antonia Caicedo Holguín: Uplifted
Incubator is pleased to present Uplifted, a solo exhibition by Colombian artist Antonia Caicedo Holguín that traces the heartbeat of London’s salsa scene through the vivid lens of cultural memory and hybridity. Originating from Cali, Colombia – known globally as the city of salsa – Caicedo Holguín draws on her roots to capture a London made more vibrant, a city reimagined through the rhythms and warmth of Latin American music and dance. Here, a night out is an invocation of memory, a celebration, and a mark of belonging in a world of overlapping identities.
Caicedo Holguín blends personal and public spaces, layering her scenes with people and moments that feel both intimately known and suggestively universal. From the Southbank Centre to Ronnie Scott’s, London’s cultural landmarks pulse with life in her paintings, as Caicedo Holguín recreates settings where the beat of salsa and Latin music merges with the city’s own unique sense of vitality. Each painting offers a sense of place that feels at once familiar and uncanny, moments captured as if in passing, reflecting a view that is at once nostalgic and revelatory.
In The Pulse of the Night, Caicedo Holguín reinterprets Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, locating the scene in a London bar that could be any number of late-night haunts frequented by London’s Latin American community. It is an invitation to see dance and music not just as entertainment but as cultural rituals that somehow capture fragments of home. Caicedo Holguín’s characters – inspired by friends, acquaintances, and chance encounters – move with a kind of mythic energy through spaces alive with expressive colour and gestures that evoke a timeless, enduring rhythm.
Her works on found wood panels, such as Dancing Shoes, are especially resonant. The texture of the wood reflects the well-worn floors of salsa clubs, offering a tactile connection to spaces where the dance itself is imprinted into the environment. This practice of selecting found materials that resonate with the subjects depicted in oil, acrylic and pastel anchors her work in a specific cultural memory, transforming each piece into an artefact of movement, both physical and migratory.
The emotional resonance of Uplifted lies in Caicedo Holguín’s ability to transform her personal memories into a broader narrative of cultural fluidity. Through her layered brushwork, she encapsulates the resilience and vitality that characterise the diasporic experience and the breadth of her achievement is so well calibrated that she also manages to attune to more private moments of intimacy and celebration. In these paintings, music and dance are more than motifs—they embody the diasporic pulse, where identity is asserted, culture is blended, and memory rises like the beat of a drum.
