Julieta Aranda

Julieta Aranda
Born	1975 Mexico City, Mexico
Education	BFA in filmmaking at School of Visual Arts NYC MFA Columbia University

BFA in filmmaking at School of Visual Arts NYC

Julieta Aranda (born in 1975 in Mexico City, Mexico) is a conceptual artist that lives and works in Berlin and New York 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.

Aranda's complex body of work exists outside the boundaries of the object, and is characterized by the struggle of catching sight of elusive concepts such as time, circulation, and imagination. 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. Much of her work takes up the concept of time, sometimes to consider alternative notions of the temporal experience, and other times to approach the arbitrariness of time and freedom from time.

In You had no ninth of May! (2006), Aranda addresses the artificiality of the homogeneous construction of time through the case of Kirbati, an archipelago in the Pacific that, in 1995, changed the position of the International Date Line (IDL). Through a series of installation pieces that conceptually and formally map the international date line at Kiribati, the artist investigates officially assigned time and calls into question concepts such as "today" or "tomorrow".

Aranda's 2007 work There has been a miscalculation (Flattened Ammunition) is an experiment on the functioning of time. This work consists in a transparent Plexiglas cube containing approximately 100 science-fiction novels with a story line taking place before 2007 (the year in which the work was first produced), which have been shredded, almost pulverized. It also contains a hidden computerized air compressor that unexpectedly and violently blows the dust around at random intervals, recalling a sudden sandstorm. This way, Aranda's work makes books endlessly circulate and swirl in an empty cube, leaving them incessantly suspended in a past future.

For Intervals (2009), a solo presentation of four works installed in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Aranda explored and inverted the notion of time as a strictly assigned linear designation marked by clocks and calendars. In this exhibition, all the works were proposed to partially describe, in the artist's words "a sense of time's passage according to subjective experience, rather than subscribed to a strict system of measurement that assigns a fixed duration to any given event". Each piece captures time's passage in an individualized sense, addressing what the artist conceives as "subject formation" and the assertion of one's dominion over one's own time as a condition for individualism.

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