Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her work combines aspects of ethnography and theater to create film and video projects that have touched on subjects including anarchist communities, the relationship between artwork and work, and post-military land. Her work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, Galería Kurimanzutto, and the Guggenheim Museum.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz received an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago in 1993 and an MFA in Film and Video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997. She has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions over the course of the past fifteen years.
Santiago Muñoz's first solo exhibition, The Black Cave, was presented in London in 2013. The exhibition featured two video projects, La Cueva Negra and Farmacopea, that explore how the Puerto Rican landscape has been influenced by the development of new infrastructure and tourism projects. La Cueva Negra focuses on the Paso del Indio, an indigenous burial site in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico. The site was accidentally uncovered during the construction of a highway twenty years ago. This video presents a dynamic history of the site through interviews with laborers, archeologists, and members of the surrounding community. Farmacopea sheds light on how the tourism industry has transformed and de-historicized the landscape of Puerto Rico. The film focuses on certain native toxic plant species, and the government's efforts to eradicate them. By focusing on the government's desire to render the landscape harmless, the film draws attention to how tourism is encourages the depiction of Puerto Rico as an idyllic and de-politicized Caribbean paradise.
Ojos Para Mis Amigos, a video piece created bv Santiago Muñoz in 2014, explored the abandoned Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in Ceiba, Puerto Rico. The piece explored the displacement of families during the construction of the military base. During filming, Santiago Muñoz collaborated with Pedro Ortiz, a Ceiba resident whose family was displaced. The video follows several Ceiba residents, including Ortiz, and examines the lasting effects of military construction on the ability of residents to access land.
La Cueva Negra (2013), digital video
Farmacopea (2013), 16mm film
The Black Cave (2013), Gasworks, in collaboration with the Tate Modern, London. The Black Cave (La Cueva Negra, 2013) draws on interviews with archaeologists and local residents, and explores the Paso del Indio, an indigenous burial ground in Puerto Rico that was discovered during the construction of a highway and eventually paved over.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: A Universe of Fragile Mirrors (2016), Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL. This exhibition presents a selection of works by filmmaker and video artist, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (b. 1972, San Juan), including a new work, Marché Salomon (2015). Capturing the ironies of post-colonial conditions in the Caribbean, Santiago Muñoz’s films and videos create connections between experimental film, ethnography, and theater, alluding to material, local, and symbolic histories. She documents specific communities and public sites to generate her own bricolage―an alternative story about a popular Haitian market, a toxic tropical flower, or a newly discovered archeological site in Puerto Rico. Her actors are ordinary people encouraged by the artist to use strategies from performance art and reenactment. Santiago Muñoz develops her works from long periods of observation, documentation, and engagement. Making the camera another character, her lens moves slowly through social and physical landscapes, capturing every detail, color, personal gesture, and movement of light, creating enigmatic stills that blur the boundaries between reality and fiction.
Upcoming April 2016: Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (2016), New Museum, NY, NY. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s (b. 1972, San Juan, Puerto Rico) projects grapple with the slippery distinctions between ethnography, fiction, and documentary film and examine the symbolic and material histories of the communities she observes with her camera. Her residency and exhibition at the New Museum will be presented in the Fifth Floor gallery as part of the Education and Public Engagement Department’s R&D Season: LEGACY, and will explore the ways in which our connections to the past are actively produced, maintained, and refuted. In this exhibition, she will premiere a new body of work, including a series of 16mm portraits of anthropologists, activists, and artists working in Haiti and Puerto Rico. Santiago Muñoz’s films capture the aspirations and imagined futures of those who are deeply invested in alternative models of being, using them as allegories for larger political possibilities in the region. This exhibition is co-curated by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement, Lauren Cornell, Curator and Associate Director, Technology Initiatives, and Sara O’Keeffe, Assistant Curator.
Awards and Honors
Creative Capital Visual Arts Grant (2015)
