SOFIA BORGES is a conceptual artist who has used the photographic medium for over a decade to study philosophical notions on the relationship between matter and meaning. She divides her non-linear research routine between three settings: a home located in a nature reserve, a studio in downtown São Paulo and her old home in the same city. In each of these locations the artist accumulates images captured in prehistoric caves around the world and in museum collections museum, as well as documentation of previously staged performances.

Using collage, performance, fire, and layers of pigments, Borges creates images that are so strange that they seem unreal and are often misunderstood as images that have been designed or manipulated using software. Nothing could be further from Borges’ work than this false perception. The radically odd aesthetic of her “traditional photographs” comes from the fact that she builds complex photographic scenarios that are either born from something that exists or from something that is constructed and then photographed.​

A spiraling practice of searching for the origin and density of the image, Borges explores an exercise of observation and addition of layers of meaning, content, and the material about what is seen, what is revealed behind the surface. Her practice is antithetical to the photographic media, which proposes to register the visible, almost in a practical ontological activity on the conception of the understanding about the whole. Borges gives us the doubt of the reverse: material images, documenting the invisible side of the perception.​

Sofia Borges (1984, Ribeirão Preto) lives and works Between São Paulo and Paris.​

Recent exhibitions include: Being: New Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2018); 33rd São Paulo Biennial – Affective Affinities: The Infinite history of things or the end of the tragedy of One, São Paulo (2018); 7th Daegu Photo Biennale, Daegu Arts Center, Daegu (2018); Il Coltello Nella Carne, Padiglione d’Arte, Contemporanea, Milan (2018); No Mold For White But No Mold For Fire, Float Gallery, Athens (2017); CORPO A CORPO: a disputa das imagens, da fotografia à transmissão ao vivo, Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo (2017); Black Chalk and White Charcoal or The Myth of The Absent Matter, Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam (2016); De Mineralis, pierres de visions, Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône, Alpes (2015).​