Karina Aguilera Skvirsky is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York, New York. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Whitney Museum, among others.[1] Working across video, performance, and photography, Aguilera Skvirsky addresses themes of migration, colonization, Latin American identity, and family history. Aguilera Skvirsky is best known for her performance video The Perilous Journey of María Rosa Palacios (2019).
Aguilera Skvirsky was born in Providence, RI to an Ecuadorian mother and a father of Eastern European Jewish descent. As a child, she lived between the Eastern United States and Guayaquil, Ecuador, where her mother was born. Skvirsky has said that the contrast between her memories of Ecuador and her life in the United States was central to her artistic practice.
Aguilera Skvirsky received her Bachelor's degree in Spanish literature from Oberlin College. In 1996, she received an MFA in Photography from Indiana University.
Career
Aguilera Skvirsky's best known work is The Perilous Journey of María Rosa Palacios, a 30-minute-long video which documents a performance the artist did in 2019. In it, Aguilera Skvirsky retraces the overland journey of her great-grandmother, an Afro-Ecuadorian domestic who travelled to Guayaquil in 1906 before the railroad was completed in 1908. The video was shown in Impermanence: XIII Cuenca Biennial, curated by Dan Cameron, in 2016 and subsequently at Smack Mellon in New York.[2][3] In 2020, the work was featured in a solo exhibition at Galería Vigil Gonzales, Sacred Valley, Peru.[4]
In 2011, Aguilera Skvirsky participated in a residency at the Laundromat Project in which she collected oral histories of downtown Jersey City through a local laundromat.[5]
In 2017, Aguilera Skvirsky had a solo exhibition entitled The Folds in the Photograph/Los pliegues en la foto at DPM Gallery in Guayaquil, Ecuador.[6]
In 2019, Aguilera Skvirsky received an award from Creative Capital to support the production of a performance-documentary entitled How to build a wall and other ruins as well as Sacred Geometry, a series of photographic collages.[7] These works explore the symbolic power of stone in Inka and Cañari cultures in Ecuador through the ruin site of Ingapirca and contemporary discourse about Latin American colonization and archaeology. How to build a wall and other ruins premiered at the XV Cuenca Biennial, curated by Blanca de la Torre, in Ecuador in late 2021.[8]
Exhibitions
A selection of other exhibitions of Aguilera Skvirsky's work includes:
2004 - From the Woolworth; Drawing Room, Jessica Murray Projects, Brooklyn, New York
2006 - Backyards; curated by Eric Heist, Momenta Art, Brooklyn, New York
2006 - S-Files; curated by Deborah Cullen and Marysol Nieves, Biennial exhibition, El museo del barrio, New York, Travelled to: Museum of Art of Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico
2007 - 50,000 Beds; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut
2007 - Interpreting Utopia; curated by Brian Wallace and Ariel Shanberg, Samuel Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, New York
2009 - Playlist; curated by Rodolf Kronfle-Chambers and Cristóbal Zapata, Galeria Proceso, Guayaquil, Ecuador
2010 - Memories of Development; curated by Rodrigo Quijano, La Ex-Culpable, Lima, Peru
2010 - There is always a cup of sea for man to sail: The 29th São Paulo Biennial; curated by Moacir dos Anjos and Agnaldo Farias, São Paulo, Brazil
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