Artists' Biographies

Carolina Caycedo

Carolina Caycedo is a multimedia artist based in Los Angeles and La Jagua, Colombia. Caycedo's practice is research- and community-based. Her extensive work – including performances, videos, installations, artist's books, hanging sculptures, and immense geographic photographs − brings forth discussions on environmental justice and bio-cultural diversity and speculates about the future of shared resources and fair energy transition. Her works confront topics such as the privatization of rivers, territorial rights of indigenous groups, and the environmental, economic, social, and spiritual impacts of extractive industries on local communities. 

Caycedo's work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022); Ballroom Marfa, TX (2022); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2021); and Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (2020). Caycedo has been featured in group exhibitions at Serpentine Galleries, London (2022); El Museo del Barrio, New York (2021); Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2019); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA (2017); Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea (2017), São Paulo Art Biennial (2016), Havana Biennial (2009), Whitney Biennial (2006), and Venice Biennale (2003).

 

David de Rozas

David de Rozas is a multidisciplinary artist, award-winning filmmaker, and educator based in California. His practice stands at the intersection of cinema, contemporary art, and research. Merging experimental documentary, film essay, and fiction, most of de Rozas’ work explores memory practices across the interwoven past-present-future. He is currently working on two features: Here We Is that focuses on the current Los Angeles’ Downtown explosive development and The Blessings of the Mystery that explores Far West Texas environmental memories.

His films have been screened in festivals and film curated series worldwide, such as Visions du Réel, Sheffield Doc/Fest, True/False, and Kassel DocFest. He directed and produced GIVE, winning seven international awards including Best Short Documentary at FullFrame and Best Experimental at the Smithsonian African American Film Festival. The film was nationally broadcast on P.O.V. in 2018. David de Rozas received a 2020 VIA Art Fund Artist Grant and was 2021 Artist in Residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

 

Gabriel Bicho

Gabriel Bicho is a multimedia artist based in Porto Velho, in the state of Rondônia, Brazil. Working across media, Bicho’s projects include photography, video, installation, print, and public interventions. His work centers on socio-environmental conflicts as well as alternative display practices to represent marginalized personal and collective narratives.

Bicho’s work has been displayed in several individual and collective exhibitions in Brazil and Europe, including Arte Pará, Belém (2013, 2021, and 2022); Rock in Rio NAVE project, curated by Roberta Carvalho, in Rio de Janeiro (2022); the 57ª Venice Biennial, the Research Pavilion: The Digital Aesthetic in Utopia of Access (2017); Pororoca, A Amazônia no Mar, curated by Paulo Herkenhoff at the Museum of Art of Rio de Janeiro (2014). His photographs, videos, and installations have been collected by public institutions in Brazil, such as the National Museum of Fine Arts of Rio de Janeiro, Museum of Art of Rio de Janeiro/MAR, University of Blumenau (Furb), MAPA/Art Museum of Anápolis, Dartes-Unir/Porto Velho, and SESC/Porto Velho). He received the Museu é Mundo award in 2021 for the Muluca curatorial project and the Fomento à Produção de Artistas Emergentes da Amazônia Legal award in the Arte Pará exhibition, 2022.

 

Laray Polk

Laray Polk is a Dallas-based multimedia artist and writer. Her artistic and written productions address ecology, climate change, probative methods, and media analysis. Polk’s investigative aesthetics draws on hydraulic engineering, archaeology, and historical research.

Her multimedia exhibitions include the 2016 Trinity River Project in collaboration with Marcus Lutyens (it focused on the Trinity River and consisted of three parts: a series of ten journalistic articles written by Polk and published in the DMagazine; three guided meditations along the riverbanks led by Lutyens; and an exhibition at the Liliana Bloch Gallery, Dallas), Gaza Zoo (a project centered around the politics of captivity and exhibited in 2004 at University of Texas at Dallas and, in 2008, at The MAC, Dallas) and The Beautiful Obstacle (a history of the military-industrial complex at MIT, exhibited in 2008 at CentralTrak Artists’ Residency, Dallas, Texas).

Her articles have appeared in print in the Dallas Morning News, D Magazine, In These Times, and online at Common Dreams, CounterPunch, Pacific Free Press, Sri Lanka Guardian, and Znet. Research projects include the study of Cambodian palm-leaf manuscripts at Cornell University, interviews with Navajo Code Talkers in New Mexico, and travel to living Maya communities and archeological sites in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. As a 2009 grant recipient from The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, she exposed a radioactive waste disposal site in Texas situated in close proximity to the Ogallala Aquifer. In 2013, she co-authored a book with Noam Chomsky, Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe (Seven Stories Press).

 

Ubiratan Gamalodtaba Suruí

Ubiratan Gamalodtaba Suruí is a photographer and filmmaker based in Cacoal, in the state of Rondônia, Brazil. He is the first photographer among the Paiter Suruí people, a native group from Southwestern Amazonia. Ubiratan Suruí employs technology (photography, film, social media) as an instrument to fight for the protection of the Suruí territory. He is a member of the Metareilá Indigenous Association, which acts against deforestation, land invaders, and gold prospectors.

Ubiratan Gamalodtaba Suruí’s photographs and film form a Paiter Suruí (counter)archive. They disseminate (counter)information on the web, denouncing invasions and illegal activities in the Suruí territory while showing contemporary indigenous tactics and strategies to protect the Amazonian biome. An example is the Pamine project for deforested areas regeneration. Such projects attest to the millenary collaboration between the forest and the forest peoples, co-producers of that biome.

Ubiratan Gamalodtaba Suruí has collaborated with several institutions and projects including Google Brazil, WWF, BBC NEWS BRAZIL, Projeto Amazônias/Sesc Pinheiro, Itaú Cultural/Itaú Bank, Moreira Salles Institute. He is also the co-founder of Lakapoy Film Collective (2021 to the present). He received the Resiliência e Orgulho [Resilience and Pride], Survival International Photography Award in 2021.

Artists' Biographies