Zipper Galeria presents “Everything I Envisioned Came True,” a new solo exhibition by Flávia Junqueira, opening on August 8, 2026, in São Paulo. The exhibition brings together a previously unseen body of photographs produced over the course of a month in New York in early 2026. The project was made possible through a partnership between the two galleries that represent the artist: Zipper in Brazil and Unix Gallery in New York. Produced primarily in the city’s public spaces, the project takes Junqueira’s staged photography out of the studio and into some of the most recognizable sites in the New York imagination. The exhibition features a critical essay by Gisela Gueiros.
The project’s novelty lies in its method. After nearly two decades of constructing controlled scenes, the artist worked on the streets without a studio, which meant that the materials had to travel with her and the balloons had to be inflated on site, while she waited for the right light and worked under conditions beyond her control, from the weather to the constraints of a small-scale production. Junqueira photographed before dawn, awaiting the daybreak that leaves the streets empty, as a way of clearing the stage and constructing the theatrical void that has always inhabited her work, now imposed upon the real city. Rather than concealing this negotiation, she incorporates it into the image, and some of the works leave the tripods and helium tank in plain sight. The machinery of illusion enters the scene, while the theater wings are exposed, making the enchantment transparent.
The title condenses meanings that the artist prefers to keep in coexistence. To invent means both to lie, staging the scene that reality did not provide, and to create, in the older sense of bringing into being something that had previously existed only in the imagination. There is also a third and more affirmative meaning, according to which perhaps nothing was ever invented at all, since magic and enchantment were already there, latent, and the artist merely made them visible. At the root of the project is a reflection on the photographic medium itself, anchored in a statement by curator and photography historian Mia Fineman with which Junqueira agrees: “the old adage that the ‘camera never lies’ was always photography’s ultimate fiction.” A hidden presence throughout the exhibition, Alice in Wonderland brings these interpretations together, since in its world the dream comes true, acquires rules of its own, and slips from the grasp of the person who invented it.
The body of work spans a broad spectrum, ranging from an affirmation of beauty and the dreamlike to the melancholy of ruin. At one end is the arcade at Bethesda Terrace in Central Park, whose ceiling contains the world’s only overhead installation of encaustic floor tiles, pieces originally designed for the ground and here suspended upside down, in an inversion embodied by the architecture and central to the artist’s work. The exhibition also includes the 1959 bronze sculpture of Alice in Wonderland, designed to be touched and climbed on by children, as well as some of the city’s most reproduced icons: the Manhattan Bridge seen from DUMBO, framing the Empire State Building in the distance, and the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk. In these images, the work deliberately moves close to the visual language of the postcard. The soap bubble, even more ephemeral than the balloon, settles into these landscapes without imposing itself on them.
In the diptych made at the Bryant Park carousel, there is no staged intervention at all, only the act of recording, which, for someone who has built an entire body of work around staging, amounts to a confession. The carousel was already there, genuinely turning among the skyscrapers, and photographing it without intervention became the most transparent way of expressing what the title says. Presented side by side, the same ride appears in two opposing states: illuminated and in motion during the day, dark and still at night.
At the other end of the spectrum lie displacement and shadow. At Chambers Street station, one of New York’s oldest subway stations, opened in 1913 beneath the Municipal Building, the artist places a carousel horse within the deteriorated space of the subway, allowing enchantment to invade the ruin. The same displacement reappears in reverse in front of an ordinary house in the West Village. In Freeman Alley, a Lower East Side passageway transformed into a living gallery of graffiti, the balloons encounter another ephemeral and popular art form: anonymous, layered paint made not to last.
Taken together, these photographs record a moment when Flávia Junqueira’s imagination, after so many years spent constructing worlds that did not exist, encountered a world ready to receive them. “Everything I Envisioned Came True” is both a celebration and a state of suspension, a carousel that keeps turning, now in slow motion.
