About

In her work, the Chilean-Peruvian artist Ivana de Vivanco (*1989) examines how discourses of power are reflected in images and how they are passed on by them. Old iconographies and narratives that have founded our modern world with its colonial foundations are studied in detail by the artist, dismantled and reinvented through speculative fictions. At once uncanny and humorous, and with a deliberately “acid” colour palette, her paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations and films depart from the traditional solemnity of the historical to write an alternative epic of the present, in which the heroes have fallen off their horses and the failure of the modernist project is revealed before our eyes. Starting from painting but in permanent dialog and cooperation with other disciplines and forms of knowledge generation - such as literature, natural science, psychoanalysis, popular culture, theatre and ritual practices - the artist questions our Western selective culture of memory and proposes different readings of the colonial, the female body and utopia as a form of historical and personal healing.

De Vivanco was born in Lisbon (Portugal) to a Peruvian mother and a Chilean father; she grew up in Santiago (Chile), Quito (Ecuador) and Lima (Peru) and came to Germany 12 years ago. Her biography, like her work, is located between two continents. The tensions between these two worlds as well as the mixed and hybrid forms of culture, art and rituality (with their conflicts and reconciliations) are at the centre of her praxis.

De Vivanco studied fine arts at the University of Chile in Santiago and completed her master's degree at the HGB Leipzig, where she also participated for eight years in a reading group on critical theory and psychoanalysis founded by Prof. Christoph Türcke. She has held seminars and lectures at several institutions, such as the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin, the University of Łódź, the University of Chile, the ETH Zurich, the Bauhaus University Weimar, the University Alberto Hurtado and the HGB Leipzig, where she is currently a professor. De Vivanco has received numerous scholarships and awards, e.g. from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the DAAD and the Marion Ermer Foundation.

Her works are and have been exhibited worldwide: Instituto de Visión in Bogotá, Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, National Art Museum in Bucharest, Natural History Museum Neuchâtel, Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Stadtgalerie Kiel, Bank Mab Society Shanghai, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt, Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin and The RYDER Projects Madrid, among others. She lives and works in Berlin.‍‍

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