Alejandra Dorado is considered to be one of the most important contemporary artists in working Bolivia

Bolivia

Bolivia officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia , is a landlocked country in central South America. It is the poorest country in South America...

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Dorado's work - especially her installations and performances - focuses on identity, gender and power relations and often involve dense layers of meaning and perspectives ranging from the conceptual intellectualization of topics and processes extracted out of every day life and Latin America

Latin America

Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages  – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

n and Western society

Western world

The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...

, to the playful yet critical deconstruction of conventions.

Personal life

She was born María Alejandra Dorado Cámara, on September 24, 1969. Dorado is a native of Cochabamba, Bolivia

Cochabamba

Cochabamba is a city in central Bolivia, located in a valley bearing the same name in the Andes mountain range. It is the capital of the Cochabamba Department and is the fourth largest city in Bolivia with an urban population of 608,276 and a metropolitan population of more than 1,000,000 people...

 and majored in Fine Arts

Fine art

Fine art or the fine arts encompass art forms developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than practical application. Art is often a synonym for fine art, as employed in the term "art gallery"....

, with a minor in painting, at ARCIS (Universtity of Art and Social Ciences) in Santiago, Chile

Santiago, Chile

Santiago , also known as Santiago de Chile, is the capital and largest city of Chile, and the center of its largest conurbation . It is located in the country's central valley, at an elevation of above mean sea level...

. She currently teaches Drawing and Techniques in the Graphic Design Program of the Bolivian Private University, and has started an innovative program for art education

Art education

Art education is the area of learning that is based upon the visual, tangible arts—drawing, painting, sculpture, and design in jewelry, pottery, weaving, fabrics, etc. and design applied to more practical fields such as commercial graphics and home furnishings...

 for the blind.

Art work

A prolific artist, Alejandra Dorado is known mainly for her finely executed installations contrived around topics such as gender, performativity, power relations and identity (de)construction. Highly conceptual in nature, her installations are often inspired from works of literature and philosophy, history and gender theory

Gender studies

Gender studies is a field of interdisciplinary study which analyses race, ethnicity, sexuality and location.Gender study has many different forms. One view exposed by the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said: "One is not born a woman, one becomes one"...

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Representative work

In LASALASDELUCRECIA (an installation inspired on the legendary figure in the history of the Roman Republic

Roman Republic

The Roman Republic was the period of the ancient Roman civilization where the government operated as a republic. It began with the overthrow of the Roman monarchy, traditionally dated around 508 BC, and its replacement by a government headed by two consuls, elected annually by the citizens and...

. The title may mean Lucretia's Wings, or Lucrecia's Halls), she portrays the same image of herself in seven different modes of representation (oil painting

Oil painting

Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil—especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil. Often an oil such as linseed was boiled with a resin such as pine resin or even frankincense; these were called 'varnishes' and were prized for their body...

, stencilling, embroidery, etc.) as Lucretia, holding a dagger against her naked chest. Her facial expression

Facial expression

A facial expression one or more motions or positions of the muscles in the skin. These movements convey the emotional state of the individual to observers. Facial expressions are a form of nonverbal communication. They are a primary means of conveying social information among humans, but also occur...

is highly ambiguous, since it can be understood, at first glance, as emotionless; however, through repetition and the playful exaggerated arrangement and inclusion of items such as feathers, candles, within the installation it can be seen as a pose, a deadpan form of delivering an acerbic yet darkly humorous critique on the discourse of female victimization and convenient voluntary disempowerment.