WASHINGTON, DC.- The Georgetown University Art Galleries announced Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Look Alive, an exhibition of select installations by internationally acclaimed Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, opening September 18, 2026. Presented across the Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery and Lucille M. & Richard F. X. Spagnuolo Gallery, the exhibition brings together three works spanning more than three decades of the artist’s practice and explores the intersections of technology, participation, presence, and the act of looking.
At the center of the exhibition is the premiere of Pulse Map, a site-specific installation created for Georgetown’s Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Gallery and the newest work in Lozano-Hemmer’s celebrated Pulse series. Comprising nearly 3,000 polycarbonate lightbulbs arranged in a labyrinthine field, Pulse Map invites visitors to move through an environment illuminated by the recorded heartbeats of past participants. Three suspended camera sensors allow visitors to record their own heartbeat and contribute it to the work. As new heartbeats are recorded, they gradually replace the oldest ones, transforming the installation into a living archive of anonymous participants.
The exhibition’s title draws on the familiar expression “look alive,” a call to attention, awareness, and engagement that takes on additional meaning throughout Lozano-Hemmer’s work. To look is not only to observe, but also to become visible. To be alive is not simply to exist, but to be present. Throughout the exhibition, presence becomes the medium through which the works come to life, connecting individual experience to larger patterns of participation and shared experience.
Look Alive also draws inspiration from literature and film, including Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel (1940) and Zbigniew Rybczyński’s Academy Award-winning film Tango (1981), both of which explore people occupying shared environments across overlapping layers of time and experience.
In the Lucille M. & Richard F. X. Spagnuolo Gallery, Look Alive turns more directly to the act of looking and the mechanisms of machine vision. While cameras in Pulse Map detect participants’ heartbeats, works presented here use cameras to detect visitors’ presence and location, transforming looking into an exchange between viewer and artwork.
Created in 1992, Surface Tension is Lozano-Hemmer’s earliest interactive work, exploring technologies of observation and tracking that, decades later, have become increasingly embedded in everyday life. A large human eye follows visitors with remarkable precision, creating the unsettling sensation that the artwork is looking back.
Also on view is Reporters With Borders, in which hundreds of television news anchors from the United States and Mexico appear in a constantly changing mosaic of moving portraits. Drawn from a database of more than 1,600 video clips, the work reorganizes itself every five minutes according to categories including gender, race, and nationality, while the silhouette of the visitor activates voices within the installation.
“I am looking forward to this exhibition of new and historical works. At a time when technology is the contemporary language of domination, as artists we have the challenge to misuse this language to create critical and poetic experiences where people can come together,” said Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.
“Presenting Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s work at Georgetown offers an extraordinary opportunity to bring our audiences into direct conversation with an artist who has continually expanded the role of technology in contemporary art,” said Jaynelle Hazard, Director and Chief Curator of the Georgetown University Art Galleries and curator of the exhibition. “His work raises questions that feel increasingly urgent today, creating opportunities for inquiry and dialogue while inviting curiosity, participation, and connection. This is exactly the kind of encounter we want to make possible through our exhibitions at Georgetown.”
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Mexican-Canadian media artist creates platforms for public participation by using robotic lights, digital fountains, computerized surveillance, and telematic networks. Inspired by phantasmagoria, carnival, and animatronics, his interactive works are “anti-monuments for people to self-represent.”
He was the first artist to represent Mexico at the 2007 Venice Biennale. His large-scale participatory art installations transform public spaces, creating connective environments for communities. In 2019, he presented “Border Tuner”, designed to interconnect the bordering cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Jurez, Chihuahua. Other works were commissioned for events such as the Millennium Celebrations in Mexico City (1999), the UN World Summit in Lyon (2003), the Winter Olympics in Vancouver (2010), and the pre-opening of the Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi (2015), among others. His works are in collections around the world such as MoMA, Guggenheim, TATE, Reina Sofa, and Hirshhorn. Recent exhibitions include “Unstable Presence,” a mid-career retrospective co-produced by the MAC de Montreal and SFMOMA; “Common Measures,” his first solo exhibition at PACE Gallery; “Translation Island,” a 2-km parcours in Abu Dhabi, and “Unfinished Garden” a 1 km parcours in Mexico City.
