In his series Av. Caracas, Bogota (2006), Alexander Apóstol depicts views of Caracas Avenue in the capital of Colombia, an avenue that was rebuilt and extended during the country's period of extensive economic and urban development in the '50s, following the then popular modernist principles of Gustave Le Corbusier. Apóstols' photographs of the city's still central thoroughfare are dominated by modernist buildings where soldiers at the corners or entrances seem to offer protection from an invisible enemy. If such an architecture welcomes the cultural influence of the "developed West", the military has often been the enforcing arm of such politics. The urban scenery revealed by the deserted streets, balancing between derelict and commonplace, only rarely converses with this low-profile modernism. The correlation between the official architecture and the surrounding buildings underlines the contrast between the high expectations of modernist utopia and post-war economic boom and the dystopia of today's disorderly condition.
In his Skeleton Coast series (2005), Apóstol photographs the carcasses of hotels on Margarita island, the spearhead of tourism in Venezuela. The blooming of investment on hotel compounds during the '80s was followed by the collapse of the '90s, leaving the imposing, bare traces of bankrupt investments on several beaches of the island. Looking as if in constant suspension, these skeletons constitute for Apóstol a metaphor for the failure of the country's greater development plan that sank into corruption and decadence. What remains is the bare, flat landscape conversing with the ambitious, multi-storey architecture of aggressive development and consumption rates. To the extent that tourism, according to John Tagg, is a democratized form of imperialism, it signifies as such a symbolic conquest of the place and the dissemination of the hegemonic cultural model of "developed" countries. In this sense, Apóstol's frontal, clinical photographs reveal the inverse view of the idyllic postcard promise.

Alexander Apóstol was born in Venezuela in 1969. Currently, he lives and works in Caracas and Madrid, having presented his work in a large number of shows and publications in the U.S. and Europe. Through a number of different series of works, he examines issues that involve the politics of public space, the relationship between architecture and history and the social inequalities of economic development. Also, the cultural interaction at a local as well as international level, the adventure of human relations through the faceless interface of modern technology, the traces of colonialist logic that survive through the coupling of art and history. At the center of his subject matter often lies the photographic and conceptual reading of the architectural and contemporary urban condition in Venezuela and the neighbouring South American countries, as well as the ways in which these meet or conflict with the american or european ideals and the stereotypes of globalized culture.