“The face always betrays what the voice so often conceals,” writes Christian Padilla in an essay on Erika Diettes’ latest series, Sudarios. In that sense, a portrait may be more revealing than any testimony, particularly when what has been left unsaid spares us from the horrific images hearing it would create in our minds.

Working from an entry point all too familiar, Diettes created a series of haunting portraits—witnesses of assassinations and massacres among populations subsumed by armed violence. The twenty subjects appear as if she has stripped them bare, literally and figuratively. As they share their grief—at the most agonizing moment of their narratives—their faces are captured, reliving the massacres that took place before their eyes.

And when these evocative photographs are printed on silk, each banner over six feet in length, “we are immediately reminded of Christian relics,” Padilla adds. “The cloth immortalizing the witnesses’ final gestures like a death portrait holding their last breath.”

Currently on exhibit at the Museo Iglesia de Santa Clara in Bogotá, Sudarios represents a departure from Diettes’ previous work as her first mixed media installation, complementing the diaphanous—albeit legible—images with the soft, almost inaudible sounds of a woman breathing. The setting lends even greater significance to the work, as the museum was originally a convent for monastic women.

A graduate of Bogotá’s Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, where she earned an undergraduate degree in Visual Arts and Communications, Diettes received her M.A. in Anthropology from the Universidad de los Andes. Her dissertation on the role of the media and its influence on the experience of death was honored and selected for publication by the prestigious Ediciones Uniandes.

Erika Diettes’ work celebrates a new generation of artists who—individually and collaboratively—challenge our normative beliefs and impact the precepts of contemporary artistic expression. Primarily interested in notions of loss, memory and the impact of violence, her visual practice has been informed by her study of the human as being, by history, and by contemporary culture.

Diettes’ artwork has been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout the Americas, and is included in numerous public and private collections. In 2010, she was named as one of Colombia’s leading thinkers by Semana Magazine.

For additional information about the artist and to see more images from Sudarios, please visit our website at www.charlesguice.com.