solo show _ Decolonizing through painting: Reverse Engineering, Resistance, and Brazilianity

Cristine Balarine presents Decolonizing through painting: Reverse Engineering, Resistance, and Brazilianity, a solo exhibition of new paintings that explore the layered relationship between land, memory, and identity through abstraction. The exhibition will be on view from 27th June through 4th July 2025, at the Anime del Purgatorio Church in Marina Corta, Lipari Island, Sicily.

Drawing upon her Brazilian heritage—shaped by Indigenous, African, and European ancestry—and her background in architecture, Cristine Balarine interrogates natural and urban territories as well as colonial legacies through a visual language rooted in transformation, resistance, and renewal. Informed by the distant memories of tropical landscapes and the sites of industrial archaeology in the Aeolian Islands where she paints, her practice engages with forgotten or transitional spaces—abandoned buildings, reclaimed land, and architectural remnants that mirror the liminal states she inhabits as both artist and subject.

The exhibition invites viewers into an encounter with works that react to landscapes without representing them—foregrounding impermanence, instability, and ambiguity that echo ancestral knowledge through intuitive, lyrical gestures. In this context, painting becomes a quiet act of decolonisation: a way of reweaving the threads of landscape, remembrance, and belonging, both personal and collective.

About the Anime del Purgatorio Church: 

The Anime del Purgatorio Church is a Baroque church of historical significance located on Lipari Island, Sicily. Built in 1545 following the devastating Ottoman raid led by the infamous corsair Barbarossa in 1544, the church was part of a broader reconstruction effort initiated by Emperor Charles V and Pope Paul III to repopulate and rebuild the island. Dedicated as a memorial to the victims of the raid, the church has undergone multiple restorations over the centuries. Since its most recent renovation, it has served as a venue for cultural events and art exhibitions.

Cristine Balarine: Decolonizing through painting: Reverse Engineering, Resistance and Brazilianity

Vernissage: Friday 27th June 7pm -11pm

28th – 4th July _ 9am -1pm / 6pm - 10pm

Anime del purgatorio church, Marina Corta, Lipari Island, Sicily