Adela Goldbard

Adela Goldbard is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and scholar from Mexico City, and a PhD student in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University. Goldbard is member of the National System of Artistic Creators of Mexico. 

With her work, she investigates how radical community performances can subvert the imposition of hegemonic narratives and how performances of violence and destruction can become aesthetic tools of resistance against power. She is especially interested in how collectively building, staging, and destroying has the potential to generate critical thinking and social transformation. 

Goldbard’s practice draws on experimental/collaborative ethnographic research and brings together sculpture, video, photography, sound, text and traditional textiles, pottery, woodwork and pyrotechnics. Her recent projects include a pyrotechnic play with/for the Mexican community of La Villita in Chicago, commissioned by Gallery 400 (University of Illinois, Chicago, 2019-2020) and a socially engaged art project with/for the P'urhépecha community of Arantepacua, commissioned by the XIV FEMSA Biennial (Michoacán, México, 2020-21). 

Goldbard’s doctoral investigation focuses on developing a Poetics of Violence: an interdisciplinary research-creation project proposing that the aesthetical potential—ritual, collective, affective—of violence, once torn from the dominant and colonizing sanctioned dogma, is a powerful tool for epistemic decolonization and political liberation/sovereignty.