Light Between the Islands background by Grimanesa Amoros
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UROS ISLAND

Grimanesa Amorós UROS ISLAND, 13 x 11-foot LED sculpture and light sculpture made of LEDs, diffusion material, vinyl, and custom lighting sequence, its domed forms evoking the sea foam of Peru's Pacific coast and the totora reed islands of the pre-Incan Uros people of Lake Titicaca. Exhibited as part of the Future Pass touring exhibition produced by Today Art Museum, Beijing, China, 2011 to 2012.
Grimanesa Amorós UROS ISLAND, 13 x 11-foot LED sculpture and light sculpture made of LEDs, diffusion material, vinyl, and custom lighting sequence, its domed forms evoking the sea foam of Peru's Pacific coast and the totora reed islands of the pre-Incan Uros people of Lake Titicaca. Exhibited as part of the Future Pass touring exhibition produced by Today Art Museum, Beijing, China, 2011 to 2012.
Grimanesa Amorós UROS ISLAND, 13 x 11-foot LED sculpture and light sculpture made of LEDs, diffusion material, vinyl, and custom lighting sequence, its domed forms evoking the sea foam of Peru's Pacific coast and the totora reed islands of the pre-Incan Uros people of Lake Titicaca. Exhibited as part of the Future Pass touring exhibition produced by Today Art Museum, Beijing, China, 2011 to 2012.
Grimanesa Amoros video thumbnail for UROS ISLAND

Location: Today Art Museum | Beijing, China, 2011 – 2012
13 ft 7 in x 11 ft 2 in x 26 in
LEDs, diffusion material, vinyl, custom lighting sequence, electrical hardware.

UROS ISLAND is a light sculpture created for the Future Pass exhibition at the Today Art Museum in Beijing, its LED form evoking both the pre-Incan floating reed islands of Lake Titicaca and the sea foam of Amorós’s Lima childhood in a work that brings one of Peru’s most enduring Indigenous traditions into dialogue with contemporary China.

  • Part of Future Pass, a landmark international exhibition produced by the Today Art Museum in Beijing, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung, and the UNEEC Culture and Education Foundation in Taipei, UROS ISLAND placed Amorós among the most significant voices in a project connecting Asian and Latin American contemporary art across institutional borders.
  • Amorós first created the Uros Island series after visiting the forty-two self-fashioned floating islands of Lake Titicaca, where the pre-Incan Uros people have built their entire world from totora reeds, from houses to boats to watchtowers, a feat of Indigenous engineering she describes as one of her most profound encounters with human ingenuity.
  • The sculpture’s lighting sequence was developed after Amorós spent time analyzing the precise quality of light from sunrise to sunset in both Venice and Lake Titicaca, blending the luminous characteristics of both bodies of water into a single unified sequence.
  • The work appears to arise seamlessly from the ground, as if it were one with the earth, a quality Amorós achieves by grounding the form in the organic logic of the reed island itself, which the Uros people continuously rebuild and replenish as a living structure.
  • UROS ISLAND received coverage in Yuan Space Museum and across international art media (2011–2012), affirming its place within Amorós’s most sustained and significant body of work and its resonance across Asian, Latin American, and international contemporary art audiences.

    • When Amorós was a child living on the coast of Peru, she always loved the beauty of the ocean; everything from the tides to the colors, to the bubbles and the foam.

    Uros Island is inspired by the islands in Lake Titicaca, located southeast of Peru. They are floating islets made entirely out of totora reeds. The pre-Incan Uros, who live on these forty-two self-fashioned floating islands, build everything out of this material – from houses to boats to watch towers.

    From these two ideas, she created Uros Island to reflect the natural elegance of sea foam and totora reeds. The sculpture will seemingly arise from the ground as if it were one with the earth.

    Future Pass is a production of the Today Art Museum in Beijing, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung, and the UNEEC Culture and Education Foundation in Taipei. It was achieved in cooperation with the Fondazione Claudio Buziol. Curator Victoria Lu (Creative Director, Today Art Museum, Beijing) is responsible for the exhibition’s content.