As part of the exhibit Optimal Conditions, Irma Yuliana Barbosa will be conducting a live performance at the Anthropology and Art Practice Building, Rm 120. Please register here for a seat.
Yuli uses a camera to preserve moments, while questioning the photographic process as intrinsic to the way we make memories, frame histories, and furthermore question what is valuable in relation to processes of preservation. They are interested in the ways memories can reveal and distort themselves in dreams, material objects, and gestures. Their sculptural work wanders the space between reason and instinct to explore intuition and light as a bridge between objects and bodies. They collect and subvert objects that are typically used to enclose and have been discarded to subvert spaces of separation such as cages, gates, frames. Yuli’s multimedia work is interested in the endless possibilities that objects, video, photography, and performance can create in relationship to each other to reimagine the present, past, and future as one magical and fleeting moment in space and time.
Bio:
Irma Yuliana Barbosa was carried over La Frontera in 1993 in her mother’s belly. Growing up with a single immigrant mother and two younger sisters in the San Fernando Valley was an experience where boundaries did not exist. They slept together in a one-bedroom apartment on a king size bed and shared shoes and clothes. They moved a lot and at an early age Yuli’s home was transformed into longing and constant reimagining. Yuli is a multimedia artist who works with personal memories as material. They use photography to explore the tension and intimacy between bodies and their environments. Through precarious and poetic installations that incorporate projections, photographs, sculpture,and performance they engage with gestures, private memories, and liminal space in relation to the politics of identity, and border consciousness to navigate and stitch spaces of separation. Constantly inspired by the malleability of transgenerational memory and its relationship to the creation of selfhood she is committed to translating, bridge-making, and investigating processes of preservation and transformation.
