BRIC Announces
Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira:
The mountain I am, Urku ñuka kani
Fall Project Room Exhibition at BRIC House
Miranda-Rivadeneira’s work, created in upstate New York during quarantine, explores indeginious ways of relating to the land through video, ceramics, and sound.
On View: September 30 – January 9, 2022
(BROOKLYN, NY — September 14, 2021) BRIC, a leading contemporary, multi-disciplinary arts and media institution anchored in downtown Brooklyn, announced today a Project Room exhibition focusing on the work of Ecuadorian American artist and curandera Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira.
On view at BRIC House (647 Fulton) from Sept. 29 to Jan. 9, 2022, Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira: The mountain I am, Urku ñuka kani encompasses an installation comprising video projections and a large-scale ceramic sound instrument.
In the video, the artist enacts sumac kawsay, an ancient Kichwa term for balanced living with the earth. Taught to the artist by her grandmother, she draws on the air or on the ground, creating impermanent marks made with stones, mud, ice, and branches. Her video composites refer to simple iconographies that echo ancestral pictographs that are universal, ancient, and urgent. These videos, along with sound created through her handmade instruments, aim to address our intersectionality with the earth and the responsibility to acknowledge the first stewards of this land and the more than human kin.
Miranda-Rivadeneira’s work will be on view during the same exhibition cycle as Athena LaTocha: In the Wake of…, BRIC’s major fall exhibition that interrogates the parallels between natural and urban environments, and the power and fragility found within each of them. These two shows — both exploring indigenous concepts —come on the heels of BRIC’s highly lauded Latinx Abstract, a groundbreaking exhibition that explored the enduring legacy of abstraction among Latinx artists. Jenny Gerow, who co-curated Athena LaTocha: In the Wake of… alongside Elizabeth Ferrer, also serves as the curator of this Project Room exhibition.
Michael Liburd, BRIC Board Chair, said today:
“BRIC has a powerful legacy of showcasing artists of diverse backgrounds who speak truth to power and help us better examine our collective relationship with the world around us. Our Fall contemporary art exhibitions do just that, by encouraging us to interrogate our relationship with the natural world and our impact on the land that we occupy. BRIC will continue to be a leading voice in these conversations and elevate artists whose work can serve as important catalysts for change in the years ahead.”
Jenny Gerow, BRIC Curator, Contemporary Art, said today:
“Miranda-Rivadeneira’s videos and sound work capture her reacquaintance with the land; ongoing work that takes on a particular relevance as our country grapples with our post-pandemic selves and what it means to introduce oneself to a landscape or other entities they have been estranged from. Her works reveal a lesson in a continuous practice of reintroduction, one that is rooted in slow and healing gestures, and takes place over many seasons in order to become familiar again.”
An opening reception for Miranda-Rivadeneira will be paired with BRIC’s fall Exhibition Athena LaTocha: In the Wake of…. on Sept. 29 from 5PM-8PM. Reservations by staggered entry are encouraged.
Miranda-Rivadeneira is an Ecuadorian American artist and curandera from Queens, New York who investigates Indigenous ways of relating to the land, through photography, video, ceramics, and sound. She has exhibited at the United Nations and Aperture Foundation, both NY; and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC. She has been an artist in residence in the United States, France, and Italy and has taught at CalArts, School Visual Arts, International Center of Photography, and City University of New York. Miranda-Rivadeneira is a recipient of multiple awards and fellowships including the NYFA Fellowship, and the Photographic Fellowship at the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris. Her first monograph, Other Stories, was published in 2017 by Autograph ABP. Her work was featured in the Native America issue of Aperture (no. 240) published in fall 2020, as well as in the book Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History by Elizabeth Ferrer, published in January 2021.
