ARTBO Weekend returns to Bogotá this week with a milestone worth noting – and a programme that suggests the event is no longer content with staying within its traditional comfort zones.

Celebrating its tenth edition from April 16 to 19, the city-wide initiative organized by the Bogotá Chamber of Commerce (CCB) arrives bigger, more dispersed and arguably more ambitious than ever. With over 160 free activities, 86 participating spaces and 280 artists from 27 countries, the numbers alone tell a story of steady expansion. But the real shift this year is geographic.

For the first time, ARTBO Weekend – Fin de Semana – pushes decisively into new territory. The addition of Kennedy, Nogal and Chicó as official circuits marks a deliberate move away from the event’s familiar enclaves. It is, in many ways, a statement about where Bogotá’s art scene is headed – or where it wants to go.

Kennedy stands out. Historically on the fringes of the city’s cultural programming, the district’s inclusion is more than symbolic. The reopening of the Chamber of Commerce’s exhibition space in the area signals a longer-term investment in decentralising Bogotá’s art ecosystem. It also raises a question that has hovered over ARTBO Weekend in recent years: who, exactly, is the event for?

For organisers, the answer has consistently been “everyone.” And, on paper, that commitment holds. Entry remains free across all venues, and the programme spans everything from gallery exhibitions and museum shows to performances, workshops, talks and editorial launches. The addition of complimentary transport routes – the Bus ARTBO – helps bridge the distances between circuits, turning what could be a logistical challenge into something closer to an urban stroll.

Still, navigating ARTBO Weekend requires a degree of planning. Bogotá is not compact, and its art circuits are spread across distinct neighbourhoods, each with its own pace and character. San Felipe, long considered the epicentre of the contemporary gallery scene, remains a reliable starting point, particularly for first-time visitors. Chapinero offers a more eclectic mix, where independent spaces sit alongside institutional venues, while the Centro Histórico provides a slower, more contemplative route through museums and heritage sites.

This year, however, the draw may well lie in the unfamiliar. Kennedy’s circuit promises a different rhythm – less polished, perhaps, but more reflective of the city’s broader social fabric. Chicó and Nogal, by contrast, introduce a more polished, design-forward dimension to the programme, expanding the conversation beyond traditional gallery spaces.

What distinguishes ARTBO Weekend from its larger counterpart, ARTBO, is precisely this sense of movement. There are no booths, no central venue, no singular point of focus. Instead, the city itself becomes the exhibition space, and the act of moving between circuits becomes part of the experience.

That experience is not purely visual. The “Conversaciones” series, curated by Raphael Fonseca of the Denver Art Museum, brings together artists, curators and academics for a series of panel discussions that aim to unpack the themes shaping contemporary art today. With free entry and simultaneous translation, the talks offer a point of entry for audiences looking to engage more deeply with the works on display.

Equally, the Encuentro Editorial continues to carve out a niche within the programme. Focused on independent publishing and the book as an artistic medium, it provides a quieter counterpoint to the busier exhibition circuits. For many, it is here – among the artist books and experimental print projects – that the creative pulse is most tangible.

After a decade, ARTBO Weekend has settled into a rhythm that feels both established and open-ended. It has succeeded in building audiences, supporting local galleries and positioning Bogotá within a wider Latin American art conversation. At the same time, it continues to grapple with the challenges of scale, access and representation that come with growth.

For visitors, the best approach may be to resist the urge to see everything. Pick two or three circuits per day. Use the Bus ARTBO, but don’t be afraid to walk, and take an umbrella for the inclement April weather. Allow time for the unexpected – a performance that spills into the street, a conversation that runs longer than planned, a small space that wasn’t on the map.

Because if ARTBO Weekend has proven anything over the past ten years, it is that Bogotá’s art scene is not confined to a single district, or a single idea of what art should be. It is scattered, evolving and, at its best, deeply connected to the city.

In the gilded stillness of one of Bogotá’s most striking colonial spaces, a new exhibition is quietly unsettling centuries-old certainties. Entonces llamó a un arcángel, the latest show by Colombian artist David Felipe Escobar, opens this week at the Museo Santa Clara, inviting visitors into a dialogue between baroque religious iconography and contemporary queer identities.

The exhibition, which opens on April 9 and runs until June 28, unfolds within the former church of the Real Convento de Santa Clara, a desacralised 17th-century site renowned for its lavish altar pieces and paintings of angels and archangels. Rather than treating these works as static relics, Escobar reactivates them—drawing them into conversation with bodies and identities historically excluded from the narratives they once upheld.

Taking its title from a verse by Saint John of the Cross, the exhibition imagines a meeting point between celestial beings and “queer, disobedient bodies” that exist beyond traditional gender norms. The result is not a confrontation with religious imagery, but a reframing of it—one that suggests ambiguity and fluidity were always present within baroque visual culture.

Indeed, Escobar’s premise rests on a subtle but powerful observation: that angels, often depicted as androgynous figures suspended between heaven and earth, already occupy a space of indeterminacy. By foregrounding this ambiguity, the exhibition reveals latent connections between colonial representations and contemporary non-binary identities, without imposing anachronistic readings onto the past.

The show is organised into two thematic sections. The first, centred on fluid identities in dislocated spaces, physically reshapes the museum environment. Selected paintings of archangels are removed from their traditional placements, disrupting long-standing visual hierarchies within the former temple. This curatorial gesture invites a more intimate engagement with the works, while questioning notions of permanence—both in museography and in gender constructs.

The second section, Una nueva Iglesia, shifts from disruption to speculation. Here, Escobar assembles apocryphal figures alongside materials such as chains and silks, constructing a symbolic space where alternative forms of belief can coexist. It is an imagined sacred realm—one that embraces multiplicity and offers refuge to identities historically marginalised by institutional religion.

Together, these interventions transform the Museo Santa Clara into a site of active reinterpretation. The building itself, once a place of rigid spiritual authority, becomes a stage for reconsidering how the sacred has been represented, contested and lived. In this sense, the exhibition does not position itself in opposition to religion, but rather proposes a space of encounter—where past and present converge to open new possibilities for understanding spirituality.

Born in Bogotá in 1992, Escobar’s practice spans visual art and writing, often exploring the intersections of violence, desire and the divine. A graduate of Parsons School of Design and Hunter College, he has participated in international residencies across Latin America. His literary work includes the novel Soap Bubble (2024) and the poetry collection 7 Iridescent Prayers (2026), further extending his exploration of spiritual and corporeal themes.

As Bogotá’s cultural calendar continues to foreground conversations around memory, identity and inclusion, Entonces llamó a un arcángel stands out for its quiet radicalism—suggesting that even within the most traditional of spaces, new meanings can still emerge.

The exhibition runs from April 9 to June 28, 2026, Tuesday to Sunday, 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with a programme of guided tours, workshops and public discussions designed to deepen reflection on the relationships between body, spirituality and diversity. Admission is free.

In Bogotá, the mountains are never out of sight. They rise abruptly along the city’s eastern edge, forming a green wall that shapes the capital’s light, weather and sense of place. For Colombian artist Marina Sánchez, the ridges that surround the Colombian capital’s cardinal points are also more intimate: a constant presence, a point of orientation and, increasingly, a subject of quiet urgency.

Her latest exhibition, Panorámicas de la Sabana, runs from 5 to 29 March inside the colonial  Museo del Chicó, where 26 acrylic-on-canvas works reinterpret the high-altitude plateau of the Sabana through a distinctly chromatic lens. Installed in the museum’s Salón Colonial, the show brings together landscape, memory and abstraction in a series that feels both personal and outward-looking.

Sánchez has long been recognized for her expressive use of colour but this body of work marks a measured shift. While her earlier practice leaned towards abstraction, here the forms are more legible—ridgelines, shifting skies, traces of vegetation – yet never fixed. Instead, they dissolve through layered pigments and gestural brushwork that privilege sensation over strict representation.

What distinguishes Sánchez’s approach becomes clear in the work itself. The Cerros are not rendered as stable topography but as shifting, atmospheric forms. Bands of diffusec green rise and fold into one another, interrupted by flashes of cobalt, ochre and lilac, while a dense, unsettled sky presses down with quiet intensity. The composition resists stillness. It moves – closer to inclement weather than landscape.

Rather than mapping terrain, Sánchez constructs it through colour. The mountains appear to breathe, their contours dissolving at the edges as if seen through mist or memory. There is no single vantage point; the eye travels across the canvas, tracing lines that feel at once familiar and unstable.

“I want to show the relevance of these giants that often go unnoticed,” Sánchez says. For Bogotá’s residents, the hills are omnipresent yet rarely examined beyond their silhouette. In her telling, they become active participants in the city’s identity – “guardians” that accompany an urban landscape marked by rapid, and at times impersonal, expansion.

The project began during the pandemic, when isolation altered both her routine and perspective. Working from home, Sánchez found herself drawn to the view outside her window: the slow fade of light across the mountains, the subtle shifts in colour at dusk.

“Being away from people – family, friends – I was left with the sky and the light of sunsets,” she says. “I wanted to replicate something I hadn’t fully appreciated and, in doing so, feel part of nature.”

Her visual language, however, is not shaped by Bogotá alone. Sánchez has exhibited in New York City and Milan – cities where she has also lived, and whose pace and structure have informed her approach to rhythm and composition. If Bogotá provides the grounding geography, New York and Milan introduce a contrasting sensibility: verticality, movement and a heightened awareness of structure.

These contrasting narratives – from urban to rural, isolation and engagement, are visible throughout Panorámicas de la Sabana. Linear gestures – suggestive of passing headlights or urban flow – cut across certain canvases, briefly suspending the stillness of the mountains. It is a restrained intervention but an effective one, hinting at the tension between expansion and preservation.

Colour, in Sánchez’s palette, is not decorative but foundational. Greens shift from luminous to dense; blues dissolve into shadow; entire forms recede into haze. The landscape is reassembled through pigment, hovering between recognition and abstraction.

She describes her work as “chromatic poetry”, a phrase that aligns with her broader intention: to create space for reflection. “I want to offer a moment of calm beyond the difficulties that surround us,” she says, “despite the inevitable conflicts, wars and inequalities.”

In Bogotá, that impulse carries particular weight. The Eastern Hills and peaks to the West are not only a visual constant but a fragile ecological system—central to water sources and biodiversity, yet increasingly under pressure from urban growth. Sánchez’s paintings do not argue this point directly; instead, they suggest it, allowing atmosphere and colour to carry meaning.

For the artist, colour remains essential. “It would be difficult for me to imagine the world in black and white,” she says. “Colour is vitality. It gives strength and solidity. It is pure magic.”

That conviction runs through the exhibition. The hills emerge not as backdrop but as presence—shifting, watchful and quietly insistent. In Sánchez’s hands, they ask to be seen again, and more carefully this time.

Panorámicas de la Sabana runs from 5 to 29 March at the Museo del Chicó (Carrera 9 No. 93-38, Bogotá). Admission is free.

Singapore has never been shy about scale. But this season, the city’s appetite for monumentality takes on a distinctly Latin American accent. For the first time, the work of Colombian master Fernando Botero makes his Singapore debut with the largest exhibition of his work ever showcased in Asia.

Spanning galleries, inter-active theatres and extensive public gardens, the landmark show presents more than 130 works, positioning the city-state as a hub for global Botero immersion. As the largest presentation of the Medellín-born artist (1932-2023), and timed to coincide with Singapore Art Week, Botero in Singapore unfolds across gallery walls, immersive media spaces and public gardens.

“My father loved Singapore,” remarked the artist’s son Fernando Botero Zea to The Strait Times, highligting that with this retrospective, the country now “has the highest concentration of Botero per capita”.

At the heart of the programme is Heart of Volume, a major gallery exhibition at IMBA Theatre, presenting more than 100 works drawn directly from the Botero family collection. Spanning seven decades, the exhibition traces the evolution of what the artist famously described not as exaggeration, but as “volume”: a formal strategy that lends weight, humour and authority to everyday scenes, portraits, still lifes and reimagined art-historical references.

Seen up close, the discipline behind Botero’s apparent abundance becomes clear. Small watercolours and intimate studies reveal a careful calibration of colour and balance, while larger canvases demonstrate his lifelong dialogue with European painting traditions—from Renaissance composition to modernist distortion—filtered through a distinctly Colombian sensibility. The effect is quietly didactic without ever feeling academic, a curatorial tone well suited to Singapore’s measured cultural landscape.

If Heart of Volume offers intimacy, Garden Grandeur delivers spectacle. Extending across the Silver Garden at Gardens by the Bay, ten monumental bronze sculptures bring Botero’s work into the rhythm of daily life. A towering Horse—more than three meters tall and weighing three tonnes – anchors the display, joined by familiar figures such as Adam and Eve, The Dancers and Woman on Horse. Installed against a backdrop of tropical greenery and glass conservatories, the sculptures feel less like foreign imports and more like temporary citizens of the city.

This democratic impulse was central to Botero’s thinking. As his son, Fernando Botero Zea, noted at the opening, the artist believed that public art should be touched, photographed and shared—an ethos that fits neatly with Singapore’s highly social public spaces. Here, Botero’s bronzes become meeting points and landmarks, their generous forms softening the city’s precision with a dose of playfulness.

The exhibition also introduces Life in Fullness, the world’s first immersive Botero experience: a 45-minute audiovisual journey narrated by his son, combining archival footage, animation and storytelling. It is a humanizing counterpoint to the grand scale elsewhere, framing Botero as father, provocateur and craftsman—an artist whose work often invites smiles, but is underpinned by a serious engagement with power, politics and art history.

Beyond the artworks themselves, Botero in Singapore signals a broader shift. Latin American artists have long been underrepresented in Southeast Asia’s major exhibition circuits, despite Singapore’s ambition to position itself as a global cultural hub. This collaboration—between IMBA, the Fernando Botero Foundation, and Colombia’s diplomatic mission—suggests a growing appetite for narratives that extend beyond the usual Euro-American axis.

There is also a certain symmetry at play. Botero’s art, with its emphasis on presence rather than speed, arrives in a city known for efficiency and control. His figures occupy space unapologetically; they slow the viewer down. In Singapore’s gardens and galleries, that insistence on taking up room feels less like excess and more like quiet persuasion.

As Singapore Art Week draws international collectors, curators and critics to one of the most affluent cities in Asia, Botero’s debut is both timely and long-overdue. It is not a retrospective weighed down by reverence, but a confident, outward-looking presentation that invites the public in – free of charge in the Gardens, and without intimidation indoors.

Botero’s Singapore moment is less about spectacle than about accessibility. His volumes, for all their heft, carry a lightness of spirit, and a persuasive contribution that art should always coexist alongside everyday life.

Two centuries after its founding in the turbulent aftermath of the Wars of Independence, the National Museum of Colombia is marking its bicentenary with one of the most ambitious exhibitions in its history. Inspirar, conmover y convocar: el Museo de la nación (1823–2023) opens this week in Bogotá, inviting visitors to reflect on 200 years of scientific curiosity, cultural formation, and collective memory in a country still redefining its national narrative.

The anniversary is more than a celebration of institutional longevity. It is a moment of self-examination for a museum conceived during the birth of the Republic and shaped by generations of scientists, historians, artists, and citizens. The museum was created by law on July 28, 1823, and inaugurated the following year, rooted in the vision of plenipotentiary Francisco Antonio Zea. During his diplomatic mission in Europe, Zea recruited a cohort of naturalists – including José María Lanz, Mariano de Rivero, Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, and François-Désiré Roulin – to establish a museum of natural history, along with a school of mines, a geography program, and a lithography workshop in the newly constituted Gran Colombia.

These early scientific figures navigated riverways and mountain passes to reach Bogotá, awaiting the young Republic’s final approval of their contracts. Their collections – birds, reptiles, minerals, anatomical studies, botanical illustrations, archaeological finds – formed the foundation of a museum that initially served as a scientific repository for a nation eager to document the vast richness of its territory. Drawings by artists such as Francisco Javier Matís and explorations ordered by Juan María Céspedes gave visual life to the landscapes and ancient cultures the Republic sought to understand and claim as part of its expanding identity.

But as the exhibition demonstrates, the museum’s role has never been static. If the early 19th century emphasized scientific discovery, later decades shifted toward the collection of historical objects, battle flags, ethnographic pieces, and cultural artifacts that broadened the institution’s mandate. Letters exchanged between luminaries De Rivero and Alexander von Humboldt, or between independence-era leaders such as Antonio José de Sucre and Gerónimo Torres, testify to the museum’s early symbolic power. Sucre himself donated the acso– a ceremonial mantle attributed to Atahualpa’s queen – and ordered that defeated Spanish flags be displayed publicly so Colombians could “witness the heroism” of their troops in the war for independence. These gestures turned the museum into a site where political memory and scientific knowledge intertwined.

Two hundred years later, the new exhibition reframes these layered histories through three major sections designed to show how Colombians have constructed, questioned, and reimagined national identity over time.

The first section, Guardar lo que eres (“Preserve What You Are”), looks back at the 19th century through illustrations, botanical specimens, and scientific journalis. These items reveal how the young nation sought to see itself—literally and symbolically—through classification, measurement, and representation. The pieces trace a lineage from early scientific expeditions to the first attempts to map Colombia’s natural and cultural diversity.

The second section, Superar la desventura (“Overcoming Hardship”), addresses conflict and reconstruction. Drawing on flags, legal documents, military archives, and early photographic material, it examines the ways Colombian society has grappled with political rupture, violence, and the challenge of rebuilding. While the exhibition includes objects from independence-era battlefields in Peru, Bolivia, and the Nueva Granada, it also connects more recent struggles with  reconciliation, and justice. The curators highlight that conflict-related objects—whether symbols of patriot triumph or testimonies of displacement and suffering—offer crucial insight into how Colombians understand the past and imagine the possibility of peace.

The third and final section is a celebration of life. Here, archaeological pieces, masks, contemporary artworks, and textiles created by Indigenous communities in Nariño and weavers from Charalá (Santander), emphasize the endurance of living traditions. Rather than presenting heritage as static, the museum foregrounds the constant reinvention of cultural expression—what it calls “a Colombia still weaving its future.”

In total, the exhibition brings together 168 pieces, including nearly 100 that had remained in storage for more than 50 years due to their fragility. Among them are old etchings, rare flags, and objects that once traveled down the Magdalena River to reach the high-altitude capital of Santa Fe de Bogotá. Their exceptional display marks a milestone for the institution and for the country’s historical patrimony.

Visitors encounter not only objects but immersive environments. A multisensory installation projects shifting images onto suspended fabrics, accompanied by a soundscape inspired by Colombian landscapes and local memories. Tactile stations offer replicas with ink and braille textures, making the experience accessible to diverse audiences. Interactive elements invite the public to create postcards, explore regional museum networks, and engage with a digital map linking Bogotá to 45 co-curated displays in 12 departments across the country. Each participating regional museum is exhibiting an object emblematic of its local identity, extending the bicentenary celebration far beyond the capital.

The exhibition reflects the museum’s evolution since its founding as a scientific cabinet of curiosities. Today, grounded in the principles of the 1991 Constitution – cultural diversity,  coexistence, protection of natural and cultural heritage – the National Museum positions itself as a space where collective histories intersect with citizen voices. The bicentenary, the museum highlights, recognizes that history is not a fixed record but an instrument for understanding present challenges and imagining future possibilities.

The exhibition at Museo Nacional runs until March 15, 2026, and includes guided tours and workshops. Admission is Free.

Museo Nacional. Cra 7 No.28-66.

www.museonacional.gov.co