Teresa Serrano has spent her artistic career creating works that interrogate the social constructs and organizing systems embedded in everyday life. Spanning four decades and encompassing painting, drawing, video, and installation, the works in It’s Life, It’s Death…It’s Life challenge familiar boundaries between life and death, the human and nonhuman, and the animate and inanimate. Serrano reveals the politically and socially charged hierarchies through which bodies and materials are categorized according to their perceived sentience, usefulness, and passivity. In their place, she offers a continuum in which animacy, the sense of being alive, and agency, the capacity to act and affect others, circulate unevenly across objects, bodies, nature, language, and matter itself.

This exhibition inhabits thresholds where cultural meaning acquires material force and matter asserts a power of its own. Ritual objects keep the dead ever present (Ofrendas, 1988–1993); cultivation transforms the poppy into an instrument of violence and death (Amapolas, 2012); human hands act upon the earth and then are absorbed back into it (Feeding Nature, 2026); and language animates inert seedpods and appears to perform across musical scores (Post Verdad, 2026; Partituras, 2013).

Across these works, Serrano presents life and death not as opposites, but as interconnected states of being. In doing so, she asks not only what possesses life, but whose life is prioritized. By showing how bodies, objects, plants, and language act upon one another, she exposes and overturns the hierarchies through which value and power are assigned.