Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
Curated by Almudena Escobar López
about the artist
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (Puerto Rico) is an artist and filmmaker born in San Juan in 1972. Taking an engaged activist position, her research-driven moving image work explores the social and political interconnections inherent to the postcolonial Caribbean context, while simultaneously drawing from anthropology, Boalian theatre, expanded cinema, and a feminist practice. She received a BA in humanities from the University of Chicago (1993) and an MFA in film and video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1997). She has completed 30+ films and videos since 2002, including Prisoner’s Cinema (2014), Marché Salomon (2015), Black Beach/Horse/Camp/The Dead/Forces (2016), and Oneiromancer (2017), which have been widely exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries internationally, including Tate Modern, Guggenheim Museum, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Serpentine Gallery, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Gasworks Gallery, New Museum, Museo de Arte Moderno, Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio, Museum of Contemporary Art Puerto Rico, Broad Art Museum, Momenta Biennale de l’Image, Brooklyn Museum, Western Front, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito, Hessel Museum of Art, São Paulo Biennial, Galería Kurimanzutto, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, including the 2017 Whitney Biennial, among many others. She is a recipient of numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including a Creative Capital Visual Art Award (2005), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2017), a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2019), and the Artes Mundi Prize (2021). She has undertaken residencies at Apexart (2005), the International Artists Studio Program in Stockholm (2012), and EMPAC (2019–2020), among others. Writing about her practice has appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, Candidate Journal, and Bomb. Santiago Muñoz is co-founder of Beta-Local, an arts organization offering experiential education programs in San Juan. She is also Director of Sessions, a seminar series anchored in the specific geography, emerging art practices, and social and political conditions of Puerto Rico. She lives and works in San Juan.
La cabeza mató a todos ( 2014)
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
La cabeza mató a todos Beatriz Santiago Muñoz Puerto Ricodigital 8 min 2014
Instructions to destroy the war apparatus with a spell. – Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
La cabeza mató a todos (The Head that Killed Everyone) is a mixing of indigenous mythologies with present-day characters, geographies, and culture in Puerto Rico. The title refers to how a shooting star was (in local mythology) interpreted as a head without a body, crossing the sky, signaling the arrival of chaos and destruction. The actor in the video, Mapenzi Chibale Nonó, is in touch with native plants—she’s a medicinal botanist but also a cultural activist. She hosts cultural events in her house, in a primarily Afro-Caribbean and post-industrial area called Carolina. – Kadist
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This screening is co-presented with Three Fold Press.
Image credits: all artworks, stills, and portraits courtesy of the artist © Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. Special thanks to José López Serra.
El cuervo, la yegua, y la fosa (2021)
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
El cuervo, la yegua, y la fosa Beatriz Santiago Muñoz Puerto Ricodigital16 min2021
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz brings together various forms of non-linear thinking and simultaneous temporalities that challenge traditional ways of reading with El cuervo, la yegua, y la fosa (The Raven, the Pit and the Mare). Taking as her model a method of Sanskrit poetry that tells two stories in the same text at the same time, Santiago Muñoz explores acts of simultaneous narration to juxtapose images and sounds from seemingly disconnected universes. A madeleine is both a pastry and an idea. Language is historical and abstract. In the “historical now” there is a plastic cup and a robotic arm at the bottom of the ocean. Each day a mare visits a junkyard near an overgrown forest and tries to mate with a Corvette. A traditional Haitian proverb states: the snake can only be measured once it’s dead. Consider things you can’t see but know are real: the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench, the Marassa Jumeaux, our attachments to past orders.
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This screening is co-presented with Three Fold Press.
Image credits: all artworks, stills, and portraits courtesy of the artist © Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. Special thanks to José López Serra.