Artist Statement

Catalina Renjifo is a visual artist and practice based researcher interested in artistic epistemologies and intercultural pedagogies. Her work deconstructs meaning making and communication, investigating mechanisms of knowledge transfer and understanding through the materials and actions she performs. 

By materialising the enquiry, giving form to learning and questioning and sharing the cognitive process of making, the aim is to widen and shift perceptions of how we come to know and reveal the underlying power structures surrounding knowledge making and knowing. 

Each artwork formulates a question and as a final piece, the specific formulation of process and materials embodies the enquiry. Describing her practice as digestive in method, research based in methodology and pedagogical in outlook, it involves breaking down, dissolving, and uniting contradictory materials to absorb and assimilate what is learnt in the process. This in turn guides the choices in presenting the artworks, Catalina reviews current strategies of engagement to deploy as embedded pedagogies, guiding and enabling the encounter with other bodies and their own cultural knowledge.  

Catalina’s interests are shaped by the multiple cultural identities she inhabits, from the colonial and post-colonial obliterations and miscegenation of Latin American culture, the realities and escapism of the art, music and politics of the violent times she grew up in and the constant renegotiation between otherness and belonging.