Nicephora is an echo chamber of female presences that resist being confined to their images.
Moving beyond familiar archetypes, voices emerge across time: an American tennis player, an ancient Greek heroine, a young Berber woman, a television presenter. Circulating among them is Nicéphore Niépce, inventor of photography. Binding these figures together is the recurring form of the amphora — container and screen, symbol of femininity and vessel of narrative — linking Antiquity to the present.
Created during Alinka Echeverría’s BMW Residency at the Nicéphore Niépce Museum, the work grows from the artist’s dialogue with the institution and its collections. Drawing connections between photography, ceramics, and practices of collecting, Echeverría assembles heterogeneous materials and histories: early postcards of Berber women, childhood memories of butterflies, and archival photographic processes. Through this rhizomatic approach, she reflects on beauty, exoticism, and the quiet violence of capture inherent in image-making.
Revisiting two centuries of photographic media — from heliography to televisual imagery — Echeverría digitally transposes museum works onto ceramic vessels, merging ancient forms with contemporary techniques. These prints are accompanied by this leporello book of visual notes, mosaic wall boxes, and a central amphora bearing a silkscreened Serena Williams. Together, these elements form a polyphonic installation that questions how women have been represented, contained, and narrated across history, while opening space for complexity, continuity, and transformation.
