ARTISTS BIOGRAPHIES
Iván Argote works in various media, video, performance, computer, sculpture and painting. He multiplies interventions in the street, on public transport, in museums and other public places. Argote's work proposes questions about how to live together and how power and history are present in our daily lives. With a certain joie de vivre and a lot of humor, he tries to criticize our passivity, in a spirit of non-resignation and rebellion. He had solo exhibitions in 2008 and 2009 at Valenzuela Klenner Gallery (Bogota); in 2011 he had his first solo exhibition in France at Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery.
Christine Brault lives and works in Montreal, Canada. As a performance and relational aesthetics artist, granted from the Canada Arts Council, the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec, she has presented her work in various countries of the Americas, in China and in Europe through artist residencies and international performance festivals.
Eder Castillo is a self-taught visual artist, whose work focuses on socio-cultural research and art in public space; at the intersection of architecture, visual art and anthropology. His projects aim at an interaction between non-traditional audiences and art. In parallel, he has developed himself professionally in the field of curatorship, teaching and cultural management. His work has been widely shown internationally. He has received several awards and scholarships in Mexico, as well as in other Latin American and European countries. He is currently a member of the National System of Art Creators of the Mexican Ministry of Culture SNCA-FONCA (2020-2023).
Emilio Chapela is a visual artist interested in developing artistic practices that, through their poetic possibilities, challenge our understanding and assumptions of the world, generating experiences that allow links and connections between humans and non-humans, reconciling us with the temporalities and movements of the world. In his work he generates reflective processes about the possibility of challenging fixed notions of time and space. A visual artist with a background in mathematics, photography and the moving image. He studied a degree in Communications at the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico. His work is part of the Jumex Collection, and his work has been presented in New York, Canada, Italy, Venezuela, Korea, Germany, among others.
Livia Daza-Paris is a Venezuelan-Canadian interdisciplinary artist and researcher. In her work, the personal and the political are always entangled. Her interest with attunement as an investigative method originates at the intersection of her background in somatic dance and her family history of political disappearance during Cold War-era Venezuela. Her research speculates on beyond-the-human testimony that includes the non-human (nature) as a witness to state violence and unofficial history. Her work has been presented at Currents New Media Festival, New Mexico; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas; Festival International de Nouvelle Danse, Montreal; PS 122 and Dance Theatre Workshop in New York City.
Roberto de la Torre works with temporary and contingent elements. His work is usually generated in the public sphere where he conceives works in which not only the visible characteristics of the objects intervene, but also involve both the objects and their effects and possible relationships. This reveals an awareness of the formal and spatial conditions of the places that he takes up in his work, including the effects and relationships that these can raise. He has participated in several national and international art festivals, his work has been presented in eighteen countries around the world, in regions such as North America, South America, Europe and Asia.
Stanley Février explores the physical and psychological suffering caused to people by the violence of the modern world. Although his politically engaged works are inspired by the problems of power in an era of globalization, they also address more intimate issues, such as the relationship with oneself and with others, which have become difficult in a world where we have lost the importance of listening. Février has participated in several solo and group exhibitions in Quebec, Montreal, Ottawa, New York, Hong Kong and Cuba, as well as in France, Germany, Spain, China, Bulgaria, Serbia and Mexico.
Ilián González's work explores notions such as the natural world, time and geometry; these notions allow her to wonder about the subject and her environment, as she is interested in observing and thinking about the relationships and structures that surround, shape and decompose them. For the artist, each subject has its own social, cultural and political context that is important to observe and experience in order to consciously avoid the self-referential path. Her work has been exhibited at Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City; VideoBrasil, São Paulo; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw; Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; among others.
INVASORIX is a feminist queer/cuir working group creating songs, videoclips, DIY publications, tarot readings and performative presentations. They are currently stationed in Mexico City on planet Earth. From there they weave networks with beings and places, they make intergalactic, multi-spatial and poly-temporal encounters. They question gender roles and intentions of artists, reflect on precarity and dream about alternative and/or utopian ways of living and being.
Regina José Galindo is a visual artist and poet, whose main medium is performance. Galindo lives and works in Guatemala and uses her personal context as a starting point to explore and accuse the ethical implication of social violence and injustices related to gender and racial discrimination, as well as human rights abuses arising from the endemic inequalities in power relationships of contemporary societies. In 2005, Galindo received the Golden Lion for Best Young Artist in the 51st Venice Biennale for her work ¿Quién puede borrar las huellas? and Himenoplastia, two critical pieces that criticize Guatemalan violence, gender violence, while demanding the restitution of the victim’s memory and humanity.
Lorena Orozco Quiyono is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Since 1990 her work has focused on installation, painting and performance, both in Mexico and abroad. Through these different mediums she reflects on the human condition, the nodal research that runs through her work: fragility and strength, fear and courage, destruction and construction, the desire for transformation and the great difficulty this involves. She is also involved in issues related to the condition of women, gender issues and equity. Orozco has given classes and workshops in painting, visual arts, and performance at several museums and universities around Mexico. She has presented solo exhibitions of her work at Open Space, Victoria, Canada, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo José Luis Cuevas and Centro Cultural San Ángel in Mexico City.
Felipe Osornio, better known by their artistic name Lechedevirgen Trimegisto, is a non-binary Mexican visual artist known for exploring themes like sexual desidence, illness, violence and death through the corporal and political dimencion of his artistic practive, which combines performance elements, the creation of images, video and sculpture. Representing queer art and post-pornography in Latin America, they conceive the work of the artist as a means through which the invisible is made visible and the immaterial is materialized. They have been the beneficiary of the Jóvenes Creadores program of the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes FONCA (2019-20) and the Programa de Estímulos a la Creación y Desarrollo Artístico PECDA (2014 and 2017). They have presented their work in Europe, Canada, the United-States and Mexico.
Perla Ramos is a multidisciplinary artist who uses strategies of recollection, extraction and reuse of waste construction materials. In her site-specific projects, she inquires on the idea of the monumental and the fragmented. Ramos has participated in various exhibitions in Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Ecuador, Puerto Rico and Brasil, as well as residency programs, biennials, workshops and lectures in relation to public space. She obtained a Masters from the Facultad de Artes y Diseńo at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in the area of art and environment 2015-2017(UNAM) and received a Bachelor or Arts from the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos (UAEM), 2003-2009. Ramos is the founder and organizer of the collective INMOBILIARIA (parasite intervention in abandoned spaces) from 2009-2016.
Tania Ximena’s work oscillates between video, drawing and installation. In her practice she tends to approach the genre of landscape from different flanks and disciplines: mountaineering, volcanology, scientific and historical research and personal and spiritual introspection, so as to replace a notion of landscape as something that is merely observed with the notion of territory as a changing mesh of social and natural factors. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Mexico, Argentina, Germany, Peru, China, Denmark, Italy and France.
While Yollotl Alvarado follows conceptual axes in which the common denominator of the collective manifests itself as an influential phenomenon in the processes of construction, both of identity and of imaginaries. His work is aimed at reflecting on the political present and works around the idea of landscape as an ideological and social construction, using the history of Mexico and national representations as catalysts for its production processes. Alvarado's work extends to the fields of cinematography, book publishing and the organization of social transformative processes.
Elvira Santamaría is a performance artist whose practice unfolds itself between urban actions, performance, process art, gestural art, performance-installation and in situ interventions. Her work strengthens links with social and political realities through introspection and a markede poetic force. Santamarina’s work has been extensively presented in festivals, artist centers, galleries, museums and public spaces in Mexico, Europe, North America, Asia and Latin America and has been published in books, catalogues, magazines and on the internet. Her most recent works include: Cartografías de Sal, Sur Gallery, Toronto, 2018; Las políticas de la psique, Centro de Arte Bernardo Quintanilla, Querétaro, Mexico 2019; Encierro Solar, 2020.
Joaquín Segura reflects on the phenomenology of violence, sociopolitical microclimates, and the relationship between ideology and history through actions, installations, interventions, and photographic works. The main concerns addressed in his recent projects revolve around the nature of power, identity in an era of particular instability, and the ontological meaning of dissidence and failure, building a diverse body of work deeply fascinated by the fissures and contradiction in social superstructures and the crucial role they play. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the world.
Laura Valencia Lozada’s artistic practice focuses on the study of memory, artistic activism, participatory art and expanded graphics. She specialized in contextual and participatory art practices at the Seminario de Medios Múltiples, FAD - UNAM. She was part of the 2013-2014 generation of the Escuela de Paz and Activisms J’Tatic Samuel Ruiz, Serapaz, Mexico city, Mexico. She studied at the MACBA Independent study Program 2017-2018 in Barcelona. Since 2003, she has worked as a printer and in collective projects of independent graphic art. Her work has been presented in Mexico, Spain, Colombia, Switzerland, the United-States among other countries.
Lysette Yoselevitz lives and works in Montreal, Canada. The central themes around which her work gravitates are identity, memory and intimacy. She is interested in traces that reveal experiences of pain related to grief and loss to explore the unrepresentable dimension of human suffering. She has had solo and group exhibitions in Canada and Mexico. Her pieces are part of public and private collections such as the National Bank of Canada, The National Library and the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec in Montreal, Canada, the Diego Rivera Museum in Guanajuato, Mexico, the Museo Ex-Convento del Carmen in Guadalajara, Mexico, and the Museo Nacional de la Estampa in Mexico City, Mexico.