Long before the global stages of Beyoncé or Madonna, and well before the avant-garde architecture of her Kick pentalogy, Alejandra Ghersi was a teenager in Caracas, Venezuela, experimenting with the limits of her family’s computer. In the early 2000s, she spent her isolated hours uploading 3D animations to DeviantArt, a digital sanctuary for a young artist who felt fundamentally at odds with her surroundings. Those early renderings were the first sparks of a visual curiosity that has now come full circle with her first institutional exhibition at the ICA in London.
Now known to the world as Arca, the 36-year-ancient musician and producer has spent the last decade as one of electronic music’s most iconoclastic figures. But the path to the ICA was not a linear ascent; it was a journey marked by profound burnout and a temporary estrangement from her own craft. For Arca, the act of beating burnout with frenzied painting became a visceral necessity—a way to reclaim a creative spark that the pressures of a professional music career had nearly extinguished.
The resulting body of work, a collection titled Angels, is far from the serene. These canvases are thick, graffitied impastos of oil, acrylic, spray paint, glitter, latex, and melted plastic. From these chaotic layers emerge nightmarish visages: wide-eyed demons, gurning clowns, and Cheshire cat grins. They were never intended for a gallery; they were the byproduct of a psychic excavation, created in a communal yard in Barcelona where the artist now resides.
The Physicality of Healing
For Arca, the shift from digital audio workstations to physical canvas was a move toward permanence and raw vulnerability. In the world of electronic production, every mistake can be undone with a keystroke. Painting, she discovered, offered no such safety net.
“I could feel myself going into a trance-like state, just trying to develop different techniques of creating texture,” Ghersi says. “When recording music, it can be overwritten or re-recorded. You can always undo things. With a physical medium, it’s raw, there’s no delete button.”
The process was often violent and frenzied. Ghersi describes painting and overpainting, melting plastic directly onto the surface, and even stabbing the materials with a knife. This aggression was not random; it was a deliberate processing of the “different violences” she had survived—traumas that she had previously compartmentalized to maintain a semblance of stability in her life.
Despite a decade of Jungian psychoanalysis, Ghersi found that language was insufficient for the task. “I realised understanding was not going to be found through language but through feeling,” she explains, noting with a touch of humor that her intense process probably scared her neighbors.
Between Mutants and Angels
The imagery in Angels reflects a fascination with mutation and the abject. For the queer and transgender artist, mutation is not a horror, but a form of “becoming.” She draws a parallel between her own evolution and the terrifying, multi-eyed descriptions of angels found in the Old Testament, rather than the sanitized cherubim of popular culture.
This preoccupation with identity and survival is rooted in a childhood of profound isolation. Born in Venezuela, Ghersi spent time in Connecticut as a young child, where her name was a struggle for others to pronounce. Upon returning to Caracas in 1998, she was labeled a “gringo” by peers due to her North Americanized accent. This external alienation was mirrored by an internal struggle; she recalls being in a “very strict closet,” praying nightly for God to change her into a straight cisgender person.
Music became her first escape. She emerged as a local phenomenon in Caracas, though she admits to a sense of betrayal during those early years, writing love songs with vague pronouns to hide her true self. It wasn’t until she moved to Recent York City at 18 to attend NYU that she found the freedom of the club scene, eventually shedding her old stage name to become Arca.
A Return to Sound
The impact of this artistic pivot is now manifesting in her music. Following the release of Kick iiiii in 2021, Arca entered a period of relative silence regarding new solo material, until the recent release of the dreamy “Sola” and the provocative “Puta.”
The healing she found through the frenzied painting process has cleared the path for a forthcoming full-length album. By unpacking her trauma on canvas, she has managed to reconnect with the “creative enthusiasm” that first drove her toward music as a hobby before it became a profession.
This journey remains tethered to her home country. Arca continues to navigate the complex political landscape of Venezuela, where she has performed for Boiler Room under the watchful eye of Amnesty International representatives. She describes the current environment as “Orwellian,” characterized by patriarchal attitudes and machismo, yet she maintains a cautious hope for the future of the LGBTQ+ community in her homeland.
“The psyche is miraculous,” Ghersi says. “Over the course of time we fragment and fracture through trauma, and hopefully somehow recombine and stay steady enough to survive and, if you’re lucky, reach a point where it’s safe to unpack those experiences.”
Arca’s exhibition is scheduled to run at the ICA, London, from April 4 to April 19, 2026.
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