Julieta Aranda

Julieta Aranda was born in 1975 in Mexico City. She received a BFA in filmmaking from the School of Visual Arts (2001) and an MFA from Columbia University (2006), both in New York. Her explorations span installation, video, and print media, with a special interest in the creation and manipulation of artistic exchange and the subversion of traditional notions of commerce through art making. She lives and works in New York and Berlin.

Aranda’s body of work exists outside the boundaries of the object. Her installations and temporary projects, which often examine social interactions and the role that the circulation of objects plays in the cycles of production and consumption, are intensely site-specific. e-flux Video Rental (2004–07), one of her most widely known works, is a collaboration with artist and curator Anton Vidokle that created an archive of hundreds of artist videos available to the public free of charge; this traveling international project was enhanced by local artists and transformed by different trends and temperaments in each new city. Similarly, her collaborative project with Vidokle and artist Liz Linden, Pawnshop (2007), transformed the New York e-flux storefront into a pawnshop where artworks submitted by artists for cash were sold if not reclaimed in 30 days. This project comments on the complex relationship between artists and the commercial market as well as the socioeconomic position of those businesses in urban communities. Time/Bank (2009–12), another collaboration with Vidokle under the e-flux banner, was an artistically minded online platform that treated time as currency. The project continued the pair’s critique of the capitalist art market while moving into the virtual realm. Her series Portable Graffiti (2006) is a study of the vagaries of context and the mutability of text; spray-painted sayings such as “I have lost confidence with everybody in the country at the moment” and similarly cutting political statements became ambiguous in the different spaces, countries, and social situations in which the works were made.

For Intervals, a solo presentation of four works installed in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2009, Aranda explored and inverted the notion of time as a strictly assigned linear designation marked by clocks and calendars. Each piece, such as a clock that kept time according to Aranda’s own heartbeat (Two shakes, a tick and a jiffy, 2009), captures time’s passage in an individualized sense. This preoccupation with temporal politics was explored the year prior in You Had No Ninth of May! (2008), a series of installation pieces that conceptually and formally map the international date line at Kiribati, the South Pacific archipelago that shifted its politically determined boundary so that its territory would no longer be split between “today” and “tomorrow,” further investigating officially assigned time as a theme of her work.

Aranda was an artist in residence at Iaspis, the International Artists Studio Program in Stockholm, (2007) as well as at the International Residence at Recollets in Paris (2008). In addition to the Guggenheim Museum, Aranda’s work has been installed in solo exhibitions internationally, including those at the Ersta Konsthall, Stockholm (2007); Venice Biennale (2011); Art Basel (2011 and 2012); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2012); Documenta, Kassel, Germany (2012); Stella Art Foundation, Moscow (2012); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma - MACRO (2012); and Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Genoa (2013). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Centre Photographique de l’Ile de France, Paris (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2009); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2010); Museum of Contemporary Art - The National Museum of Art, Design and Architecture, Oslo (2010); Istanbul Biennial (2011); Atelierhaus Monbijoupark, Berlin (2011); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Paseo de la Reforma y Gandhi, Mexico City (2012); Shanghai Biennial (2012); Witte de With, Centrum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Rotterdam (2013); PAM, Public Art Munich, Munich (2018); MUAC, Mexico City (2021), among other venues.