BYRON TOLEDO: The Whole Water of a River

Jun 6 – Jul 12

Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York is pleased to present BYRON TOLEDO: The Whole Water of a River. The exhibition takes as its point of departure the Machángara River, which flows through Quito, Ecuador, the artist’s hometown. Rather than functioning as a fixed natural entity, the river is understood as a shifting urban system shaped by continuous processes of extraction, waste, and regeneration. Like many waterways in metropolitan contexts, it begins as a clean source and gradually becomes contaminated as it absorbs the city’s material and infrastructural excess. Within this framework, the artist traces its watershed over time, attending to both the forms of life it sustains and the contradictions it reveals.

Within this landscape, urban and territorial forces intersect to produce layered and often conflicting narratives. The river emerges as both symptom and site of persistence, sustaining a complex web of human and nonhuman life alike. Water circulates through plants, animals, bodies, hills, and ravines, moving across visible and subterranean spaces as it threads through the fractures of urban expansion.

The exhibition was developed with curatorial accompaniment by Eduardo Carrera and organized by Cecile Chong.