Pérez y Requena: A Parrot, Three Bars, and Gold Teeth

The practice of Pérez y Requena (Israel Pérez and María Requena, b. 1975 and 1978) explores overlooked dimensions of the city and its territory—particularly their native Santa Cruz de Tenerife and the Canary Islands archipelago—treating them as a fragmentary, restless archive.

Through a practice that intertwines research and artistic production and extends beyond sculpture and drawing, Pérez y Requena’s project uses the exhibition space and publishing to explore a field of relationships between the archive, urban drift, and installation. Engaging with found materials, documentary remnants, popular imaginaries, ephemeral architectures, commercial signage, and graphic fragments, the artists develop a language that sets the city’s processes of transformation and the symbolic violence that permeates it against forms of fiction, displacement and resistance. Attentive to fragile traces, vanishing trades, and marginalised lives, their work not only recovers these remnants but also critically reactivates them to reflect on the intersections between desire, power, territory, urban memory, and visual culture.

Co-curated with Néstor Delgado Morales (Curator Temporary Exhibitions, TEA), “Un loro, tres bares y dientes de oro” [A Parrot, Three Bars, and Gold Teeth] is conceived for TEA’s Sala C. The exhibition and its accompanying publication emerge from images, objects, and rumours connected to “Conquistador”, a research project the artists have been developing since 2008. The project examines the liminal urban zone where Santa Cruz’s historic centre transitions into its market and port—an area once associated with festivity and marginality, and later reshaped by urban regeneration, of which the construction of TEA on the banks of the Santos ravine. Attentive to minor histories and informal economies, nocturnal dissidence, and desire, Pérez y Requena trace a “delinquent“ history that runs counter to official accounts of the city’s development. Notions of tropical modernity intersect here with vernacular architecture, alongside with reflections on the boundaries between natural and artificial, invasive and native.

Israel Pérez and María Requena both graduated in Fine Arts from the University of La Laguna in 2000, later completing Diplomas of Advanced Studies in Painting at the same institution, where they now also teach. Their work has featured in group exhibitions including “Nudos y enredos 2/5”, Círculo de Bellas Artes de Tenerife, Santa Cruz de Tenerife (2025–26); “Pintura enojada”, Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City (2024–25); “Concretos”, TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), León (2022–23); and “No news, good news”, CAAM Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2019). Recent solo shows include: “Conquistador”, Galería BIBLI, Santa Cruz de Tenerife (2022) and “The Fall”, Sala de Arte Contemporáneo, Santa Cruz de Tenerife (2017).