Frida Robles

Frida Robles is a Mexican artist, curator and researcher. She holds a bachelor’s degree in History from the Iberoamericana University in Mexico City and a Master’s degree in Social Design from the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

She situates her artistic practice within the philosophy of the essay with a focus on site-specificity, which has varied from public art installations to performances to textual work.

Since 2014 she has participated in different artistic residencies in the USA, Portugal, Germany, Austria, India, Senegal and Sweden. She has collaborated as a co-teacher, co-curator and co-editor with [applied] Foreign Affairs since 2017. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Art History Department at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna (with support from the JUMEX Contemporary Art Foundation) which focuses on contemporary performance art from Southern Africa.

Robles research interest focuses on contemporary artists from Southern Africa who make use of performance art practice as a space to (re)fabricate and (re)connect with their own personal and social pasts resorting to the use of fables, storytelling, myth-making and ancestry recollection.

It is important to note that these artistic proposals are commentaries to deeply abused societies.

Robles ventures to say that a re-enchantment of the world would allow for a spiritual and magical narration of the self. This research intends to think of performance artistic practice as a means to activate the possibly dormant magical character of our past and time-thinking. Furthermore, this inquiry addresses the fact that these artists are challenging notions of historicity and ancestry.

Is it possible that a narrative of the self constructed from ancestry would jeopardize current and traditional (Western) notions of historiography? How are the findings of speculative fiction by —theoreticians such as Saidiya Hartman — informing performance art and vice versa? Is there really a space for political emancipation or agency by the embodiment, re-formulation and appropriation of narratives of time and the self? Which spirits, ghosts, fables and myths can be invoked and activated through aesthetics inquiries? Are the selected artists interested in what I would like to frame as a “healing of history”?