Claudia Joskowicz

Claudia Joskowicz

Datos generales

Nombre	Claudia Joskowicz
Fecha de nacimiento	1968
Nacionalidad	Boliviana
Ocupación	Artista plástica
Formación profesional	Licenciatura en Arquitectura en la Universidad de Houston, Texas
País de nacimiento	Bolivia
Ciudad de nacimiento	Santa Cruz de la Sierra

Claudia Joskowicz is a Bolivian visual artist who has worked primarily with video. Her work depicts the social and political reality of her native country, articulating historical and current events to extract them from their initial context and then transfer them to a digital medium, generating another artistic perspective.

Biography

Joskowicz was born in 1968 in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. In 1990, she participated in an exchange program at the Ecole d'architecture de Paris-Villemin in Paris. She later traveled to the United States to study for a bachelor of architecture degree at the University of Houston, Texas, where she graduated in 1991. During the nineties, she participated in small group exhibitions showing her audiovisual work. In 1998, she received the Jack Goodman Award for Art & Technology from New York University. In 2000, she graduated from the master of arts program at the same university, where she presented her first public exhibition based on her thesis work.

That same year, Joskowizc participated in the AIM Fellowship residency at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York. Three years later, in 2003, she was part of another artist residency, Workspace: The Woolworth Building Residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York. In 2005, she won first prize in modified digital photography from the Simon I. Patiño Center in Cochabamba, Bolivia. She was a J. William Fulbright Scholar in research and teaching in Bolivia during 2009. Two years later, in 2011, she won the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in film and video and in 2014 she was present at the Commission for Mid-Career Artists by the Cisneros Fontanals Foundation in Miami.

Parallel to her academic and research participation in the arts, she has taught in the United States and Bolivia. Particularly notable was her teaching career in the Steinhardt Department of Visual Arts at New York University where she taught video and multimedia from 2006 to 2015. In 2013, she taught at the Simon I. Patiño Foundation in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. From 2007 to 2015, she was part of the advisory committee of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (HEMI) at New York University. Since 2017 she has been an assistant professor in the Department of Art at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

Artistic career

Her artistic career began while she was still attending the University of Houston and New York University. She participated in numerous solo exhibitions, beginning in 2000 when she presented Jenny and David at the Momenta Art Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. In 2002, she presented this work again at the Video Project Room in Minneapolis. In 2009, she exhibited two works in two art spaces in Bolivia: Music to Watch Dead Girls By at Kiosko Gallery in Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Recreaciones (Recreations) at the National Art Museum in La Paz. The following year she presented her work Round and Round and Consumed By Fire at Thierry Goldberg Projects in New York.

In 2011, Joskowicz participated in the VII International Biennial of Art—SIART with her video installation Intersecciones (Intersections). In 2012 and 2013, she exhibited works such as Simpatía por el diablo (Sympathy for the Devil), Intersecciones (Intersections), Recreations (Recreaciones), and Evidencia (Evidence) in several cultural centers in Bolivia and the United States. In 2014, she presented What if Time Stood Still? at Project Space Galerija Gregor Podnar in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The following year she exhibited her work Recreations at Die Ecke Arte Contemporáneo in Santiago de Chile. The work Every Building on Alfonso Ugarte Avenue—After Ruscha was presented in 2016 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York and How I Finally Lost My Heart at LMAK Gallery in New York during 2020.

Notable group exhibitions include “Zapping Zone” in 1999, presented at the Hubert Winter Gallery in Vienna, “Video X: Ten Years of Video at Momenta Art” in 2003 at Momenta Art Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, and “Beyond Images”, a video installation presented at the IV International Media Art Biennial in Seoul, South Korea in 2006. Joskowicz also exhibited in 2007 in Beijing with the exhibition “Timeline: Human Speed & Technology Speed” by the Korean Cultural Service. She has exhibited in Colombia with her intervention in 2009 at the VII Encounter of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at the Museum of Architecture at the National University of Colombia, Bogotá; during the 45th National Artists’ Salon; and with “El revés de la trama” (The Reversal of the Plot) at Santa Fé gallery in Bogotá during 2019. She has also participated in numerous international group shows in Brazil, Ecuador, Denmark, Argentina, Spain, and Germany, and other countries.

Characteristics of her work

Claudia Joskowicz's work is immersed in social, political, and cultural situations, focused on a particular interest in addressing the spatial background of Bolivia, Latin America, and the world and the past and present reality of these territories. She mainly uses video installation and digital media, keeping in mind the environment where the work is exhibited. Also recurrent in her works are sequence shots, inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky, one of her favorite film directors. Time and space are decisive in cinematographic works, since the purpose as an artist is to present the spectator with the content in a given duration and environment.Historical events in Bolivia, such as the death of Che Guevara, and social situations, such as the protests against the privatization of natural resources such as gas in El Alto, a town next to the Bolivian capital, recreate situations that the artist constantly seeks and alters, bearing the context in the background. This represents a simple but radical way of looking at the situation.Similarly, this artistic exercise allows Claudia Joskowicz to express how history is consumed and understood, and what the relevance of the media is when transmitting information to different audiences.

In order to better document local or national events, depending on the work and its context, artistic objectivity is transcendental as a way of re-reading a past that has an infinite number of meanings and convergences. To this end, Claudia Joskowicz's works orbit between fiction and reality, a duality she uses to explain and involve the observer in the artistic purpose. Likewise, the landscape and the environment are part of her work, in which the camera moves with a specific speed, usually slowly, to mix personal experiences and interests with community situations and problems, making use of collective memory to convey a message and a feeling that invites reflection on the continuity and distortion of history.

Featured works

• 2006: Music to watch dead girls by
• 2008: Drawn and Quartered
  • Vallegrande, 1967
• 2009: Round and Round and Consumed by Fire
• 2011: Sympathy for the Devil
  • Every building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte – After Ruscha
• 2014: Los rastreadores (The Trackers)
• 2015: Hay muertos que no hacen ruido (Some Dead Don’t Make a Sound)

Works by Claudia Joskowicz in the Banco de la República Collections

Works by Claudia Joskowicz in the Banco de la República Collections

Title	Year	Location	Technique	Registration number
Drawn and Quartered	2007	Reserve	Video	AP5501
Round and Round and Consumed by Fire	2009	Reserve	Video	AP5500
Vallegrande 196	2008	Reserve	Video	AP5499

Timeline

• 1968: Born in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia.
• 1990: Exchange studies at Ecole d'architecture de Paris-Villemin in Paris.
• 1991: Graduates with a degree in architecture form the University of Houston, Texas.
• 1998: Recipient of the Jack Goodman Award for Art & Technology, New York University.
• 1999: Participated in the showcase Zapping Zone at Hubert Winter Gallery, Vienna.
• 2000: Completed the master of arts degree at New York University.
  • Participated in the AIM Fellowship art residency at the Bronx Museum of Art, New York.
  • Exhibited at Momenta Art Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.
• 2003: Participated in Workspace
• 2005: Won first place for modified digital photography at the Simon I. Patiño Center, Cochabamba, Bolivia.
• 2006: Participated in the IV International Biennial of Media Art in Seoul, South Korea.
• 2007: Exhibited at the Korean Cultural Service in Beijing.
• 2009: Became a J. William Fulbright Scholar in Bolivia.
  • Participated in the VII Encounter of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, Museum of Architecture, National University of Colombia, Bogotá.
• 2011: Awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
• 2014: Participated in the Commission for Artists of the Cisneros Fontanals Foundation, Miami.
• 2019: Participated in the 45th National Artists’ Salon with El revés de la trama (The Reversal of the Plot), Santa Fé Gallery, Bogotá.
• 2020: Exhibited at LMAK Gallery, New York.

See also

• Biography.
• Claudia Joskowicz. Artillery Magazine.
• Claudia Joskowicz by Omer Fast. Bomb Magazine.
• Claudia Joskowicz: Hay muertos que no hacen ruido (Some Dead Don’t Make a Sound). Revista Artishock.

Bibliography

1. Bernal, María Clara & Pini, Ivonne. (2012). Traducir la imagen. El arte colombiano en la esfera transcultural. Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes.

2. Westgeest, Helen. (2015). Video Art Theory: a comparative approach. Malden: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Banco de la República Art Collection

• Visit Claudia Joskowicz's work Drawn and quartered at Colección de arte

• Visit Claudia Joskowicz's Round and Round and Consumed by Fire at Colección de arte

• Visit the work Vallegrande 196 by Claudia Joskowicz at Colección de arte

Credits

1. Research and text: Alejandro Lozano, mediator of Banco de la República museums and collections, for Banrepcultural.

2. Revisión y edición de textos: Inti Camila Romero Estrada y Diana Marcela Salas Solórzano. Servicios al Público y Educativos, Unidad de Arte y Otras Colecciones (UAOC)

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