In Memory of a Totem : Solo Exhibition of Jumu

Gallery XXL is thrilled to present In Memory of a Totem, the first solo exhibition in India by Berlin-based Latin American artist Jumu (Jurena Muñoz Lagunas). Opening on Saturday, January 31, in parallel with India Art Fair, the exhibition probes individual and collective memory as a site of representation and resistance. Here, memory becomes a living totem which is resilient, enduring, and carrying within it knowledge, culture, and tradition.

Born in Germany to Peruvian and Chilean parents, Jumu’s frequent travels to Peru, Chile, and Mexico have shaped her practice as an archive of stories and symbols rooted in Latin America. Embracing the wholeness of her Indigenous Andean ancestry, Jumu works with tangible materials to bridge the streets and the studio, moving fluidly across muralism, painting, performance, and design in a process of reconciliation with her multicultural identity.

Drawing from the Andean cosmovision where the past, present and future converge through the condor, puma and snake, Jumu’s work engages Indigenous understandings of nature, time, land, and embodiment. Her visual language stems from oral tradition, weaving ancestral motifs, colors, and patterns into contemporary bodies. The jaguars, owls, crocodiles in the paintings, masks and wooden sculptures emerge like half-remembered characters from childhood stories which are carried forward into the present as a longing for kinship.

Throughout the exhibition, bodies emerge as both artifacts and portraits of women at rest and at work, positioned as keepers of memory and language. Their physicality defies idealized depictions; instead, it asserts presence through labor, intimacy and care. These women become reflections of the self as figures who navigate and negotiate their Indigeneity within urban life in an ongoing search for belonging. Transmitted through everyday actions, they position survival as a form of quiet resistance.

Across mediums, Jumu practices a process of repetition and return, revisiting memories as a way of preserving them while allowing transformation. Moving between geographies and histories, the gestural marks made on canvas, textile, paper and wood, which compose Jumu’s body of work from 2021 - 2026 unfold in the confines of an immersive exhibition — suspending the artworks as mementos of time. In doing so, In Memory of a Totem opens up
a belief system that exists between past and present, personal and collective, material and immaterial. The totem persists not as an object, but as a living memory that is carried forward into the future.