Javier Téllez

Javier Téllez is a Venezuelan artist and filmmaker, living and working in New York City.

Early life Javier Téllez was born in 1969 in Valencia, Venezuela. Both his mother and father were psychiatrists, thus exposing Téllez to ideas and concepts about mental illness from a young age. His father worked at Bárbula Psychiatric Hospital in Venezuela and would sometimes treat patients with his son in the same room. Téllez has spoken about attending carnivals at the hospital—known for its progressive, alternative treatment methods—where patients and psychiatrists would switch uniforms to symbolically invert their stereotypical, daily roles. This later became influential in his work and inspired his interest in masks and the carnivalesque.

In 1911, his grandfather founded one of the first movie theaters in Venezuela. As a child Téllez would spend time in the projection booth, sparking his interest in film from a young age.

Téllez has commented on his memories of visiting art museums as a child and drawing connections between museums and psychiatric hospitals saying “both institutions are symbolic representations of authority, founded on taxonomies based on the normal and the pathological, inclusion and exclusion.”

He was a participant in the P.S. 1 International Studio Program in 1993-1994, the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1997-1998, the Gasworks Studio Program, London in 1999, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999. In 2010 was invited to the DAAD Residency in Berlin, Germany

Téllez has been openly critical of the corruption and class conflicts in his native Venezuela, opting to turn down his invitation to represent Venezuela at the 50th Venice Biennial.

Techniques and processes

Javier Téllez is widely known for his films which feature patients from psychiatric institutions, thus allowing traditionally marginalized groups of people the power to narrate their own stories. While his interest in film was in part inspired by his grandfather, Téllez sees film as a medium with which one can expose reality and therefore easily lends itself to the ideas and intention of his work. Oedipus Marshal (2006) was commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum. The cowboy culture nostalgic, Western style remake of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex was made in collaboration with patients from the Oasis Clubhouse psychiatric facility in Grand Junction, Colorado. Téllez was inspired by the link between hypnosis and cinema, specifically auditory and visual hallucinations.