Berenice Olmedo: Nabila

François Ghebaly is proud to present Nabila, a new sculpture by Berenice Olmedo exhibited at the gallery’s Los Angeles space.

Mexico City-based artist Berenice Olmedo creates sculptures and kinetic installations that often integrate prostheses and orthoses. Her works, which are fusions of medical plastics, armatures, and surgical implants, challenge notions of human wholeness. In her practice, Olmedo considers standardized or hegemonic expectations of the human body and explores the extent to which external aids are essential to contemporary life. By reusing forms and materials from the medical field in her sculptures, she challenges dominant fixations on efficiency and optimization in favor of a more mutualistic, politically inextricable view of embodiment.

Olmedo’s 2026 kinetic sculpture Nabila is one such anthropomorphic assemblage, its pale violet frame made from medical plastics, joinery, aluminum, and a pediatric HKAFO, or Hip Knee Ankle Foot Orthosis. The work suspends in space from a network of transparent cords that connect to an operator on the wall. When activated, the cords direct the central figure in a slow, careful choreography that is neither totally vertical nor horizontal, but somewhere in between. The figure cautiously shifts its weight to the left, now to the right; it gradually draws itself upward only to return to its original supine position on the floor. As in Nabila, Olmedo frequently titles her work after the patients whose prostheses she appropriates, including those she knew while volunteering at Mexico City’s Centro de Rehabilitación Infantil Teletón—a gesture at once sentimental and indelibly political. Her work refuses binaristic views of illness, convalescence, and ontology, and instead underscores the limitations of our readymade orthodoxies for understanding our own humanity. She writes, “there is no stigma of disability in the world I propose, but only variations of existence, variations of movement, variations on slowness and speed.”

Berenice Olmedo (b. 1987, Oaxaca, Mexico) lives and works in Mexico City. Solo exhibitions include Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Kunsthalle Basel; Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris; Simian, Copenhagen; Jan Kaps, Cologne; and Lodos, Mexico City. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts MFAH, Houston; Moody Center for Arts, Houston; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; ICA Boston; Boros Collection, Berlin; Musée d’art contemporain Bordeaux; HERmit Space, Beijing; Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland; Parasite, Hong Kong; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey; Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha; Kunstverein Hannover; ERES Foundation, Munich; Tenerife Espacio de las Artes; Dortmunder Kunstverein; Krannert Art Museum, Chicago; Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte, Mexico City; Den Frie, Copenhagen; Basement Roma - CURA, Rome; OK Center, Linz; and Kunsthalle Exnergasse WUK Vienna. She participated in the 36th São Paulo Biennial, the 14th Bienal do Mercosul, and the 2nd Riga Internation Biennial of Contemporary Art. She will be included in New Humans: Memories of the future at the New Museum in New York in March 2026.