Aranza Cortés Karam

Mexico, resident 2022

Aranza Cortés Karam (Mexico, 1992). Radical art historian. Writer, non-traditional educator, manager and producer of art with historiographical approaches. As an artist, manager, curator, and researcher, she experiments with third world concepts, images, technologies, and forms of organization, primarily by independent workers. She is an Art Historian from the Universidad Iberoamericana and has studies at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Cultural Studies: Gender, Sexuality and Power. She is the director of Galería y Archivo Ficción, a project with which she has participated in fairs such as Latin American Art Fair 2018/19 (San Diego, California), Material Art Fair 2020 (Mexico City), Fransizka Imagen en Movimiento 2021 (Mexico City ) and Clavo Movimiento 2022 (Mexico City). In 2021 she presented her exhibition 'El efecto (Remix)' at Estudio Marte. She curates / publishes the fanzine 'TRRRÁFICO PEXADO'. She is a translator/editor specializing in contemporary art and US-Mexico immigration policy.

Frontera pastiche remix

Aranza is an art historian, from Mexico, who for a long time denied her facet as an artist. Over time and at the insistence of her colleagues, she began a process of showing her work for what it is: works of art. Aranza unites these two facets from a pastiche of photographs borrowed from the internet, acid, sarcastic, delirious and extremely intelligent writings such as "Heterosexuality is not a sexual practice, it is an imposed regime.", to create a captivating historiographical content that proposes a reading against the grain of canonical tradition. Every act that Aranza performs is an act of resistance.

Her own history of travel and border crossings such as the one between the US and Tijuana, are part of her artistic research and her facet as a cultural border manager-Aranza held a series of exhibitions with Latin American women artists. Generally, she works collectively, inviting us to rethink artistic practices. Her stay at her residence was no exception, and for her final show, Aranza made a fanzine where she added several pages created by her companions.

In the final exhibition, Aranza arranged on a table on one side several fanzines and a travel diary of his San Francisco crosses until he reached the Botanical House.

Aranza works questioning hegemonic cultural constructions that are taken as truths, she builds her own archive and problematizes the idea of fiction in the art world. White Noise was one more place where she built, created and developed another type of art: the collective.

Text: Irene Gelfman