Our Bodies Have Been Bridges review – riveting portraits and the story of the first woman on Earth

In the 1990s, the late Chicana artist Laura Aguilar was living with depression. A friend took her on a road trip to New Mexico, where Aguilar made some nude self-portraits in the mystical landscapes. Those photographs evolved into a pivotal series shot in desert environments across the American south-west, Aguilar’s notable 1996 Nature Self-Portrait – considered an early work of intersectional feminist art, before the word had entered academic discourse.

London gallery Autograph first worked on an exhibition of Aguilar’s in 1997, the year after she made Nature Self-Portrait, so this is something of a homecoming, a generation on. Aguilar’s contours, folds, and crevices sometimes disappear into the barren desert landscapes, assimilating the shapes of boulders or trees; at other times, her body is incongruous, soft flesh that can’t be held by the harsh, barren conditions. These images capture the paradox of a body that is both hypervisible and ignored.

Several works from Nature Self-Portrait appear at the beginning of Our Bodies Have Been Bridges, Autograph’s new three-person headline show. They’re so quiet and minimal, shot in black and white, they’d be easy to coast past – which is partly Aguilar’s point. Bodies like hers – large, queer, Chicana – had no visibility in culture at the time Aguilar made these works, while in real life her experiences were of an uncomfortable, scrutinised presence. Out here in the terrain of nowhere, Aguilar returns her body to the earth – a body wanting to just be a body, to not ache to fit in. A body with the same cracks, dents and curves as the land; hardy, wild and free. They’re photographs about rejection, but also embrace.

This is the beginning of three concurrent exhibitions at Autograph about rebellious bodies. In the first and largest, Our Bodies Have Been Bridges, Aguilar’s story continues through two younger artists who also use their bodies as anchors, in pursuit of healing, truth and connection to ancestral female knowledge. In a diaristic, family album-style account of matriarchy and ritual, Other Stories/Historias Bravas, the artist Koyoltzintli re-enacts remembered scenes from her childhood in the Andean mountains of Ecuador.

Her bare breasts are blessed by her aunt, for protection. In another picture, her mother braids her hair tenderly, the same way, the caption tells us, her grandmother had once done for her. Her mum takes her to sit among the iguanas at the local park, to cure her of her phobia of the reptiles. Routines of care passed down generations of women, through their bodies. Tangible, physical, felt knowledge and history is reflected in Koyoltzintli’s very direct, intimate approach to photography. In a group of works from the series Meda – indebted to Aguilar’s self-portraits – Koyoltzintli asked women to interact with the land as their ancestors might have, to trace a collective, imagined, silent story of the first woman on Earth. An alternative origin story.

These works appear with Peruvian Tarrah Krajnak’s grainy, photocopied, archival images that focus on 1979 – the year the military regime ended in Peru, and also the year of the artist’s birth. The works explore the dissonance between women’s bodies portrayed in the country’s media and the private, personal experiences of living as a woman through that time and the years of armed conflict that followed. She takes images cribbed from newspapers and magazines published that year, and to query their veracity, photocopies, rephotographs, and interrupts them with her own image. The bodies here are agitated, unstable and unresolved.

Upstairs, this dovetails seamlessly into Charan Singh’s Your Tongue in My Mouth. As the unforgettable title promises, Singh’s work is a joyful provocation, but also a serious meditation on desirability, sexuality and reciprocity – when certain bodies are seen by some as a burden, a threat.

Singh’s lucid colour portraits of Hijra, Kothi and trans people combine a realist sensibility and theatricality – the subjects’ authenticity contrasts with choreographed poses; beautiful hand-painted backdrops behind them evoke a world of fantasy and escape. Riveting, regal portraits such as Umrao and Sonu have a timeless elegance: the subjects’ decision to wear traditional salwar kameez or anarkali-style dress, ornate brocade fabrics, their bodies adorned with henna and bindi, are intentional gestures that they also belong to a longer history in south Asia. These portraits are statements of dignity that claim their right to that place without words or apology.

The subtle tension between realism and artifice takes on a particular urgency against the backdrop of India’s deteriorating trans rights. In March 2026, legislative amendments to the country’s Transgender Persons Act 2019 rolled back protections for gender self-identification, raising profound questions about bodily autonomy, recognition and the right to define oneself. A timeline of transgender history and rights, displayed on a table at the centre of Singh’s exhibition, situates these intimate portraits within a longer struggle for visibility and legal recognition, grounding their gestures of self-fashioning and self-expression in a shifting and often hostile political reality.