Biography
Clarissa Tossin is a visual artist who uses installation, video, performance, sculpture, and photography to negotiate hybridization of cultures and the persistence of difference. By embracing semantic displacements in given material cultural ecosystems, Tossin's work reflects on circulation from the level of the body to the global industry.
Tossin's work has been exhibited widely, including in the exhibition Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2018), and in the Twelfth Gwangju Biennale in Gwangju, South Korea (2018). In 2017, Tossin received a commission from the city of Los Angeles as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA for the exhibition Condemned to Be Modern at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Also in conjunction with PST: LA/LA, her work was included in the exhibition Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas at the UCR/California Museum of Photography, which...will travel to the Queens Museum in 2019.
As a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard University (2017-18), Tossin worked towards the installation Encontro das Águas (Meeting of Waters) (2018), which became the subject of a solo exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX. The project unfolded into a new exhibition, Future Fossil (2019), commissioned by the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University. Tossin's work has been exhibited domestically at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA; SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM; Queens Museum, New York; and internationally at the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel; Iberê Camargo Foundation, Porto Alegre, Brazil; La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, Mullhouse, France; SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, Brazil; and Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl, Marl, Germany.
Tossin is the recipient of a Fellows of Contemporary Art Fellowship (2019) and an Artadia Los Angeles Award (2018); a Fellowship for Visual Artists from the California Community Foundation (2014); and an Artistic Innovation project grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation (2012). She holds an M.F.A. from the California Institute of Arts.
Artist Statement
My work engages with material cultural production primarily through installation, video, and sculpture. I'm concerned with how cultural differences resist, or are transformed, through exchanges at a local and global level. Sometimes this inquiry follows my own geographic displacements; growing up in Brasília, Brazil, instigated an early interest in the unacknowledged narratives implicit in the built environment. In order to re-contextualize these historical narratives, I employ decolonizing strategies based on my own lived experiences. By doing so, I propose relationships that question established subject positions and claim spaces for idiosyncratic experiences.
A recent body of work focused on 1920s Mayan Revival buildings located in Los Angeles and reflected the relationship with the body and performance found in ancient Mayan architecture and cosmology, while claiming a different space for those structures to exist in the present. Tracing history through gesture and displacement, my sculptures often carry the performatic presence of the body; my videos excavate unacknowledged narratives contained in the buildings of Oscar Niemeyer and Frank Lloyd Wright.
December 2018
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Biography
Tania Bruguera is a Cuban installation and performance artist whose practice pivots around issues of power and control. Often interrogating and re-presenting events in Cuban history, Bruguera's work investigates how art applies to everyday political life, focusing on the conversion of social affect into political effectiveness.
As the 2018 Tate Modern Hyundai Commissioned Artist, Bruguera fostered the creation of the Tate Neighbours. Comprised of people who live and work in the same London postcode as the Tate Modern, the Tate Neighbours seek to explore how the museum can learn and adapt to its local community. Bruguera's work can be found in the permanent collections of many institutions, including The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, Havana, Cuba.
Bruguera initiated the formation of Immigrant Movement International (2010-15), a community agency that provided social services to immigrants and transnational residents. As part of Migrant People Party (2010-15), a "party of ideas" conceived as a new form of mass political organization, Bruguera launched an Immigrant Respect Awareness Campaign and established an international day of actions on December 18, 2011, which the United Nations has designated as International Migrants Day. Bruguera also founded The Arte de Conducta (Behavior Art) program at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba to study the relationship between performative arts and politics and their possible implementations in society.
Bruguera has been named a National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting Fellow (2017), a Yale World Fellow (2015), and is the recipient of a Meadows Prize (2013). She holds an M.F.A. in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as degrees from the Instituto Superior de Arte and the Escuela de Artes Plásticas San Alejandro in Havana, Cuba.
Artist Statement
As an artist I have been researching ways in which Art can be applied to everyday political life, not only as its dispositive for self-reflection but as a way to generate and install models for social interactions that could provide new ways to engage with utopia. The concept of the ephemeral is one that presents itself in the form of the political and its effectiveness. The political is elaborated in my work at specific locations, behaviors, and negotiation processes all with a consciousness of its temporality and range of actions. I consider my work to be contextual art, one that subordinates any pre-conceived notion of aesthetic or artistic strategies to the needs of the here and now, of the currency, weight, and impact of the events in relationship with specific moments of history and audiences. The ephemeral is also located in the problem of authorship, which tends to be distributed and disseminated among the participant-performers in my work.
December 2018
Entrada actualizada el el 31 ene de 2019
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