PICT Hosts Art Exhibition

On Saturday, 30 March 2024, the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking (PICT) hosted Women at Night, the first solo exhibition by painter and illustrator Ambar Velasco. The event, which also marked the artist’s Paris debut, was hosted by the Mairie de Paris Centre.

According to the artist, the theme of the exhibition was born out of an investigation into her own fear of the night. “For me,” she states, “each fear is very much a misunderstood path to a dream. For Women at Night, I let a personal fear of the night guide me and discovered a seasoned dream of sharing a relationship with the moon.”

The work is especially concerned with the apprehension felt by many women as they dare to expose themselves to the night outside the safety of their homes. “It’s not only violence I fear,” the artist comments, “but also judgment. You do not walk alone at night, especially as a woman.” This apprehension is reflected in the work; in Ambar’s words, she “could not ignore the real violence that haunts feminine bodies making moves at night.”

Nonetheless, following the metamorphosis of a fear into a dream, the work exudes an affirmative air: “I decided to create images that were aspirational and enchanting, depicting the night space as one full of wonder and possibility,” Ambar remarks. “Now there is a lot of certainty I feel when looking at the night sky. A positivity that places women, men, and everything in between on the same level, in the same night-sphere. Yet the mystery endures.”

Ambar is Creative Assistant at PICT, where she has collaborated on numerous projects such illustrating the monthly PICT e-newsletter and  “A Cloud in Love,” the children’s tale by Nazım Hikmet, translated into English by Evrim Emir-Sayers for dePICTions, PICT’s annual critical review.

PICT would like to thank everyone who came out to see Ambar’s work and made the exhibition such a success. Ambar herself would like to express her special gratitude to Yassine Wietrich for his help with logistics and photography, Alexis Velasco for using her expertise in interior design to transform the exhibition space into a cohesive environment, and both her sisters for making the trip to Paris to support the event.