I am a German-Bolivian artist, curator, researcher and educator. My work is mostly situated within artistic-research projects, which expand over multiple years and my different practices, that are tightly intertwined with each other.
My artistic work mainly involves performance, photography, video, and various textile techniques. Questioning different hegemonic power structures tied to systems of systematic oppression and violence, my work is an expression of the search for new visual vocabulary; gestures and movements that expand my/our understanding of how to articulate and confront those power systems, as well as the need for transformation towards a world that recognizes interrelatedness and constant change as a necessity. My work has been exhibited at Ocean Space Venice, tba21- Academy (Italy), the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Salta (Argentina), nGbK Berlin (Germany), Biennial Sur Cúcuta (Colombia), Biennal Sur Buenos Aires (Argentina), Wiener Festwochen (Austria), among others.
I grew up in Berlin, with a German mother and a Bolivian father. Since my teenage years I have lived between Bolivia, Argentina, Austria and Germany, and have been based in Berlin and Vienna in recent years. The exploration of the in-between of different worlds, as framed by Gloria E. Anzaldúa, and her concept of autohistoria-teoría—the placing of the personal history within structural dimensions—have played a great role in my work. I studied Fine Arts and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Universidad Nacional de Arts Buenos Aires. My interdisciplinary practice is strongly tied to collective formations, and I believe that creating, working and positioning my work within those affective, spiritual and political networks is what most fosters change and transformation. I am the founder of the collective TRENZA, the first Latinx decolonial feminist collective in Vienna, formed in 2014.
The exhibitions I have curated took place at The House of Austrian History, District*school without center Berlin, Weltmuseum Vienna, Public Library Vienna, Public Library Munich, the Austrian Parliament, Zoom Kids Museum Vienna, The Austrian Association of Women Artists (VBKÖ), among others.
I am currently employed at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, in the Department of Art and Communication Practices. Before that, I was part of the artistic-research project Repatriates at the Central European University, funded by the European Research Council (2022-2026). From 2018-2022, I was a senior researcher at the University of the Arts Berlin, as a member of the research project Knowledge in the Arts, funded by the German Research Foundation.
My articles have been published in peer-reviewed magazines, books, and other publications. I have presented a variety of seminars at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Weißensee School of Art and Design Berlin, University of Applied Arts Vienna, and lectures and workshops at conferences within institutional and non-institutional settings.
While my website includes the conventional categories to divide my work, I am aiming to express a deeper understanding of how my different practices relate to each other in a less hierarchical way and logics of time or “newness” through the sub-pages formations (soon to come). I am highly aware of the reduction and contradictions within logics of self-representation that this website format inevitably contains. I still hope this abstract site becomes more than a self-referential context for applications (very legitimate) and a gesture of capitalist extractivism of the individual practice, but also an archive of my own and all the collective efforts and structures I was happy to contribute to, that go beyond my individual positioning.
We don’t want to be
Stars but parts
of constellations.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Contact:
info(at)verenamelgarejoweinandt.com