Adela Goldbard is an interdisciplinary artist/educator/scholar from Mexico City. She holds an MFA as a Full Merit Fellow in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Language and Literature from the National University of México (UNAM). She is a PhD student in the research-creation stream of Interdisciplinary Humanities program at Concordia University and a member of the National System of Artistic Creators of México.
Goldbard investigates how radical community performances can subvert the imposition of hegemonic narratives, and how performances of violence and destruction can become aesthetic tools of resistance against power. She is especially interested in how collectively building, staging, and destroying has the potential to generate critical thinking and social transformation. Goldbard’s practice draws on experimental/collaborative/sensory ethnographic research and brings together sculpture, video, photography, sound, text and traditional textiles, pottery, woodwork and pyrotechnics. Her recent projects include a pyrotechnic play with/for the Mexican community of La Villita in Chicago, commissioned by Gallery 400 (University of Illinois, Chicago, 2019-2020) and a socially engaged art project with/for the P’urhépecha community of Arantepacua, commissioned by the XIV FEMSA Biennial (Michoacán, México, 2020-21).
Goldbard’s doctoral investigation focuses on developing a Poetics of Violence: a research-creation project proposing that dramatic violence with its aesthetical potential—ritual, collective, affective—can become a tool for the unsilencing of non-hegemonic narratives, for epistemic decolonization, and to support struggles for justice and autonomy. Her research-creation will take place in the Andean region of Bolivia and Perú.
