Letter to the Mother

2026LED neon light, aluminium installationEnglish: 21 × 2.8 metres; Arabic: 14 × 2.8 metres

Elena del Rivero’s practice explores memory, care, communication, and repair through drawing, installation, and works on paper. Letter to the Mother extends a series developed since 1991, transforming the intimate act of letter writing into a public gesture of reflection and connection. Inspired by the saying ‘Paradise lies beneath the feet of mothers’, the bilingual neon installation reflects on motherhood as a source of compassion, care, and love. In literature and poetry, the mother often serves as a metaphor for homeland, safety, and cultural identity. Positioned along 'the Rocks' at Souq Al Mina, with the water as its backdrop, the work evokes continuity and passage, extending its reflection on motherhood as a connection carried across places and generations.

Artist's Biography

Elena del Rivero

New York, USA

Elena del Rivero’s practice explores communication, memory, and repair through painting, works on paper, installation, performance, printmaking, and analogue photography. Based in New York since 1991, she transforms letters, domestic materials, and personal archives into meditations on intimacy, displacement, motherhood, and history. Her ongoing series Letter to the Mother, begun in the early 1990s, examines care, transmission, and mending. Her exhibitions include LA QUEMA at the Museo Nacional de Antropología, Madrid (2026); Transitar ‘LA QUEMA’ at Museu Tàpies, Barcelona (2025); HOME ADDRESS at the United States Embassy, Madrid (2024) and New York City Hall (2023); and The Archive of Dust: An Ongoing Project at Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma (2021). Del Rivero received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts (2019), Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2020), and Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2015). Her work is held in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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