Over the past forty years, Jorge Tacla has explored places where history is deeply affected. His work often shows pressured bodies, charged landscapes, and buildings altered by power, influenced by experiences of exile, political violence, and the ongoing flood of images. Living between Santiago and New York since 1981, Tacla has developed a visual approach that remains open-ended, focusing on what remains after disaster and the ongoing impact of trauma.
At Sharjah Art Foundation, Tacla’s most expansive exhibition to date—Time the destroyer is time the preserver, curated by Amal Ali—brings together more than 170 works across eight interconnected chapters. Borrowing its title from T.S. Eliot, the exhibition frames time as a volatile force that corrodes and conserves in the same gesture. Spanning Tacla’s journey from the early figurative urgency of Body and Violence, to the charged terrains of Remembering the Desert and the architectural geometries of A Geopolitical Triangle, and culminating in the scorched testimonies of Injury Report and the intimate ritual of Anatomy of Dyslexia, the exhibition traces how memory is constructed, suppressed, and reclaimed.
The later chapters—Scenes of Protest, Hidden Identities, and Rubble—move the narrative toward collective resistance and global catastrophe, confronting the politics of representation without surrendering to spectacle. Together, these works offer a meditation on trauma as both intimate and systemic. In this context, Suzette Bell-Roberts speaks with curator Amal Ali about shaping this expansive survey, the role of architecture as witness, and the ethical demands of staging Tacla’s work in a time marked by image saturation and compassion fatigue.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: The title Time the destroyer is time the preserver suggests a paradox at the heart of your practice. How do you understand time as both an eroding and an archival force across four decades of working with violence, memory and aftermath?
Jorge Tacla: The exhibition began with my interest in how visual culture processes the rapid cycles of building and redevelopment in Gulf regions. I wanted to look into how collective identities form and change through materials, gestures, and images. By using familiar regional symbols such as the sun, sand, and heat, I aim to show how identity is shaped by the environment, social context, and technology.
