Sofía Gallisá Muriente

Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a Puerto Rican visual artist and filmmaker. She was born in Hato Rey in San Juan, Puerto Rico and graduated from New York University earning her BFA in Film & TV Production and Latin American Studies.

Gallisá Muriente’s artwork includes film and photography among other media. Her works utilize the study of history, archives, and collections in relation to the environment and colonialism and use film, video, prints, and writing. She explores broad topics of human life and creation, particularly through the lens of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Topics of her art include anti-colonialism, anti-assimilation, and anti-imperialism. She is queer.

Selected works Gallisá Muriente’s art is multi-media but often uses documentation and archives to convey and examine memory and imagination. In one of her earliest works, created during her time with Beta-Local, Lluvia con nieve (2014) uses video from Paramount News that documents the 1955 transport of two tons of snow to Puerto Rico. Lluvia implements this archival footage to dissect the footage as an archive and extract its implications. She has said that “...art works for [her] as a mechanism for feeling and thinking at once.” Her outlook on Puerto Rico is positive and hopeful and she explores imagery that emulates this thought, questioning why they are more of the landscape as opposed to the locals. This thought, she suggests, is “sinister” in its dismissiveness of the people inhabiting the places in question.

In 2018, Gallisá Muriente was awarded the Puerto Rico Artist Grant. She was granted $2,500.00 to support the production of the series Asimilar y destruir. Asimilar y destruir implements physical alterations on photographs, manipulating their conditions. Recognizing how politics can complicate notions of beauty, she contemplates ways of looking at and observing a place and the effects of timing or history.

Her works often use imagery to cross the boundaries of time. Gallisá Muriente draws upon her family background and linkages to her family history in order to engage in counter-historical narratives. By connecting the intimate to a broader scope, she presents an empathetic view of transformation and reflection. She has spoken about the volume of photography in Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria, which led her to the idea of decomposition. Using footage of Puerto Rico after not only Hurricane Maria but also COVID-19 in addition to personal video, Gallisá Muriente balances in Celaje (2020) the temporality of the damage in the images with the resilience of those in residence. Celaje is a part of the MoMA’s collection, Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond.

Exhibition history and fellowships Source: Exhibitions

The Whitney Museum of American Art (Greenwich Village, New York, USA),

Savvy Contemporary (Wedding, Berlin, Germany) Embajada (San Juan, Puerto Rico)

Fellowships

MoMA Cisneros Institute Puerto Rican Arts Initiative Smithsonian Institution Annenberg Media Lab at USC

Partial list of works