Sofía Gallisá Muriente
Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and having earned her degree in Fine Arts at New York University, Muriente is a visual artist who mines contemporary cultural institutions and historical sites for evidence of contradictory or contested narratives. She has participated in experimental pedagogical platforms led by artists substituting graduate studies with a collaborative process of learning and unlearning. Through a multitude of approaches to documentation, her work aims to deepen the subjectivity of historical narratives, examining formal and informal archives, popular imaginaries and oral history. She eventually moved back to Puerto Rico as a fellow at Beta-Local’s La Práctica, an artistic research and production program, allowing her to deepen her work with video art, self-publishing, and installation.
Dead Man in the Ring (2014)
“In this work, Muriente documents Puerto Rican funerary practice in her ongoing project The Business of Death. Meditating on the relationship between representation and death, the artist films and photographs wakes where the deceased has been staged in a realistic setting, such as in a bar or in a boxing ring, according, in most cases, to their explicit instructions. These moments speak to yearning for visibility shared among the dead and the living. Overall, through the representational acts, artists comment on their own agency in relation to their race, gender, and sexuality and showcase the analogous ways they are enmeshed with the environments they inhabit.”
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Watch your step / Mind your head? (2015-17)
Irene de Andrés and Sofía Gallisá Muriente present a selection of works developed between 2015-2017 that tackle the question of who constructs the concept of paradise and who consumes it the most, as experienced from the Caribbean nation of Puerto Rico. Within the island’s colonial context, both as a former Spanish colony and a ‘possession’ of the U.S., the two artists work in tandem to question how cultural differences are marketed within the new colonial relationship that the tourism industry embodies. They work in photographs, prints, installation, and video formats, remixing original and sourced materials including photographs, short documentaries, propaganda, and vacation videos from various official and personal archives, as well as the internet.