Nando Alvarez-Perez: The Dead Hand of the Past

Rivalry Projects is thrilled to present Nando Alvarez-Perez: The Dead Hand of the Past, his second solo exhibition with the gallery. Alvarez-Perez creates photographs packed with juxtapositions between objects, texts, and images appropriated from Western Culture. The works become flattened timelines of the past, present, and future – speculative constellations of historical narratives. The title of the exhibition is taken from the work of sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who writes in The Ministry for the Future, “The dead hand of the past clutches us by way of living people who are too frightened to accept change.”

The Dead Hand of the Past includes 12 photographic works in custom steel frames. This new series transitions from stylistically uninflected lighting strategies of past works towards lighting and composition reminiscent of Italian horror films and sci-fi neo-noirs. Including materials at the core of changing modes of industrial and artistic production over time – steel, marble, computer chips, and money – these in-camera collages also feature “low” cultural stand-ins for “high” cultural ideas. In each photograph, a central object is depicted amongst a layered visual chaos, and corresponds to a specific page from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which has been an important influence for Alvarez-Perez.

He says of this body of work, “I know I’m not alone in feeling helpless in the face of history’s inertia, like our moment is one of mutual ruin and disintegration, or a car crash in slow motion. I often return to Hegel’s image of his own world dissolving imperceptibly until, ‘in a flash and at a single stroke,’ a new one appears. These pictures, I hope, catch something of that collision; if not the moment of transformation, then at least the debris left in its wake.”

The exhibition will be on view from Friday, January 16 – February 27, 2026 and is accompanied by a new text, commissioned on the occasion of the exhibition, by local artist and writer Kit Xiong.

This exhibition is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.