One-night only screening & talk with Karen Miranda-Rivadeinera

Moderated by Photograph editor Jean Dykstra

Tuesday, August 7, 2018. 7 PM.

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My images are of el Bolivar, a small region in Ecuador's Andean mountains. They are about merging fact and fiction to tell a truth.

 

There is a propensity for the extraordinary to happen when one plays with the boundaries of what is possible. The spirit of the mountains reminded me not to take photographs, the instances I capture presented themselves, and my task is to ask permission to borrow them. This is how some of these images arose;  collaboration was born out of spontaneity and play, and intervention was born out of curiosity.

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This is a body of work not of a single mind but of a collective intention that transforms itself in the next photograph, leaving behind and creating rivers of stories within.

 

The mouth of the mountain jaguar is the entrance to the vertebrae of this land, it is the collective and sensorial body and once you are on it, there is nothing else but to dance like a hummingbird.

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~ Karen Miranda Rivadeneira

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KAREN MIRANDA-RIVADENEIRA was born in NYC and since 2006, has been collaborating with native communities and relatives: the Mam in Guatemala, the Mandaeans between Iraq and Iran; the Waoranis in the Amazon, and more recently in the Andean Mountains of Ecuador. She holds a BFA from School of Visual Arts in NYC.

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Miranda focuses on themes of identity, intimacy, memory, perception and our relation to nature and the wider cosmos. She is interested in threading personal and collected narratives that are photo based, performative, and largely collaborative. 

 

She had exhibited her work widely, including at the Smithsonian, Musee du Quai Branly Biennial, Fotofest Houston, and Queens Museum. She was an artist in residence in 2016 at the Musee du Quai Branly, and at Lightwork foundation, Wurlitzer Foundation, Pour L'image in France, and Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy.

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Her work is held by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, among other private and public spaces. Her first monograph, Other Stories, was published by Autograph ABP in early 2018.