New York, NY – Penumbra Foundation is pleased to present a detail is not a fragment, a solo exhibition by Paola Fernanda, a Colombian visual artist and experimental filmmaker based in Finland. A public reception is scheduled for June 12th, 2025, from 6 PM to 8 PM.

a detail is not a fragment presents three 16mm experimental short films—Trenzando futuro (Braiding Future); Pelogramas (Hairgrams); and Sín título, autorretrato (Untitled, self-portrait)—as both 16mm projection loops and contact printed photographs. 

Paola Fernanda’s films use intimate, personal and collective experiences to reflect on identity, cultural displacement, family and the body as a site of memory.

According to the artist, the construction of her images come fully from process. “My hair … is a timeline that I have kept since I left Colombia,” she says. “Although hair is not a living object, it grows similarly to plants and carries infinite memories that can serve to attribute life to it. Hair has a place in memorial, ritual, and magic, and it has an ambiguous relationship to the rest of the human body. Pelogramas was made without a camera and as a result, the record is a continuum without the intervals between frames.”

Paola’s images invite viewers to observe the materialization of her connections and to contemplate, without obstacles, that the work does not project an anchor to a single way of looking or a prescription to one possible translation of her notions of mobility, women’s roles and standings, or the perceptions of the individual within an “alien” community.

The exhibition will run through August 5th, 2025. 

About Penumbra’s Exhibition Space
Penumbra’s Exhibition Space is a new gallery dedicated to presenting work that advances historic and alternative photographic processes in ways that are as conceptually and socially relevant as they are materially driven. The goal of this space is to foster conversations about the role of photography in contemporary society through curated exhibitions and collaborations.

About Penumbra Foundation
Penumbra Foundation is a non-profit organization that brings together the Art and Science of Photography through education, research, outreach, public and residency programs. Its goal is to be a comprehensive resource for photographers at any level, artists, students, professionals, historians, researchers, conservators and curators. Penumbra specializes in advancing the use of historic and alternative photographic technologies for contemporary image-making.