Blurring the line between fact and fiction, the works featured in Life as Activity: David Lamelas invite viewers to move through space and time by identifying with images of celebrities. This new collection brings together Lamelas’s experiments in a wide variety of media—including sculpture, film, photography, and video—to emphasize the constructed nature of narrative and identity. Made by this influential conceptual artist in Argentina, Europe, and the United States between 1966 and 2020, the thirteen projects featured in this book demonstrate the agile and inventive ways Lamelas has played with form and medium. Life as Activity: David Lamelas includes full-color illustrations of new works by the artist and never-before-seen documents from his personal archives.

Life as Activity: David Lamelas developed from a graduate seminar in Hunter College’s Advanced Certificate in Curatorial Studies and is supported by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), which advances scholarship and public engagement with art from Latin America. ISLAA proudly sponsors Hunter College as its inaugural university partner in the ISLAA Artist Seminar Initiative, an education and curatorial program that fosters intimate exchanges between students and living Latin American and Latinx artists.