For the 2022 festival, this exhibition presented portraits from the Los Historiantes series which confronts the complex cultural history of the artist’s native El Salvador. Studio Lenca is the working name of artist Jose Campos — “Studio” referring to a space for experimentation and constantly shifting place; “Lenca” referring to ancestors from El Salvador.

The paintings explored the layered erasure of Campos’s culture through enforced Spanish and US cultural dominance, now seen through the lens of his UK citizenship, where his identity is officially listed as ‘Other’. 

Jose Campos was born in La Paz, El Salvador and like many had to flee the country during its violent civil war during the late 1980s. He travelled to the US by land, illegally with his mother. He grew up in San Francisco, California as a queer minority in the gaze of a strictly conservative administration as an undocumented ‘illegal alien’. Ultimately, he found refuge in the UK and became a British Citizen in 2007. This experience of being uprooted serves as a framework for his ideas about identity and belonging.