Dentro de ti: Desire & Consumption in the Anthropocene, 2025
Solo Show on June 9 — August 21, 2025.
David Brower Center, Berkeley, California. U.S
Dentro de ti: Desire & Consumption in the Anthropocene is an exhibition by queer Peruvian artist Andrea Sifuentes Hernandez, presented by the David Brower Center in Berkeley, California. Through drypoint prints and mixed media such as embossing and powder, the artist explores her daily life as a couple and how consumption habits shape our identity and impact the environment.
Using personal photographs as a base, Andrea explores souvenirs such as keychains from the Museum of Modern Art - MoMA, snacks like Cheetos, and waste found on the streets of Lima (CDs, spoons, and plastic cups), highlighting the tension between the personal and the commercial spaces. Her works shows how capitalism permeates art and our most intimate experiences. Inspired by the song "Dentro de ti" by Chilean singer Javiera Mena, the exhibition invites us to reflect on what we consume and what it reveals about our identity.
Dentro de ti:
Desire and Consumption in the Anthropocene
Works by Andrea Sifuentes Hernandez
“The topic of the market is intricately related to environmental degradation. Pollution affects not only the air, the rivers, and forests, but also the souls. A society obsessed by the frenzy to produce more ends up turning ideas, feelings, air, love, friendship and even the people themselves into consumer products. Everything becomes a thing, to be bought, used and then thrown into the trash.” Octavio Paz in his Nobel Prize lecture, 1990
The David Brower Center proudly presents Dentro de ti: Desire and Consumption in the Anthropocene, an exhibition of prints and paintings by queer Peruvian multidisciplinary artist Andrea Sifuentes Hernandez. The artist reflects on how everyday habits of consumption shape us—as individuals and collectively—and impact the environment.
Often based on photographs of the artist’s personal life, her works show private moments punctuated by inescapable commercial iconography. Her work highlights the tension between the personal and the commercial in social experiences structured around consumption. She explores how food and entertainment commodities become canonized as aesthetic markers of our identities. One such example is the Peruvian soda Inca Kola, a beverage so nationally beloved that the Coca Cola Company subsumed it into its line of products in 1999 after repeatedly failing to outsell it in Peru. Her practice also examines how patterns of commercialization converge with the realm of fine art.
Through these works, Sifuentes Hernandez comments on the ephemeral nature of our lives and the inorganic traces of ourselves that we leave behind. Her works frame our consumer choices as simultaneously full of expressive possibility and prescribed by the forces of capital. As a queer woman in a starkly patriarchal culture, Sifuentes Hernandez uses the visual language of her own daily habits to express the richness of her life and relationship without compromising her safety. The show takes its title from “Dentro de ti” by Javiera Mena, an openly lesbian Chilean singer-songwriter; the song’s lyrics address a well-traveled, cosmopolitan listener and question whether their vast life experiences include deep introspection. In parallel, this exhibition invites us to reflect on the things we consume and what they reveal about our identities, relationships, and values.
Cristina Cabrera, Berkeley, 2025.
