Artist Statement/ Biography

VERÓNICA PEÑA is an interdisciplinary artist, and her work explores absence, separation, and the search for harmony through Performance Art. Her practice is motivated by challenging existing preconceptions, generating new understandings, and eliminating barriers to human unity; barriers such as migration politics, physical distance, pain, racism, machismo, cultural segregation, and death. Her performance installations combine underwater submersion, visual metamorphosis, and audience participation to address global issues of migration, cross-cultural dialogue, peaceful resistance, liberation, and women’s empowerment. On her work, stillness and confinement are a means to overcoming separation, and counteracting violence. The prolonged submersion of the body is an act of resilience against imposed limitations. Submerged, the female body reveals strength, the immigrant defies distance, the alive search for the absent.

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VERÓNICA PEÑA is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and community organizer from Spain based in the US. Peña has performed and exhibited principally in Europe and America. In the US: Coaxial Arts Foundation (2021), Pioneer Works (*2020 postponed due to Covid-19), Grace Exhibition Space (2020), Smack Mellon, Triskelion Arts, Queens Museum, Hemispheric Institute, SAIC (Visiting Artist), Times Square, Armory Show, Defibrillator Art Gallery, Gabarron Foundation, Dumbo Arts Festival, among others. She was selected for Creative Capital NYC Taller 19-20, received a Franklin Furnace Fund 17-18, and a Universidad Complutense de Madrid Fellowship (Juan Genovés Taller). She published “The Presence Of The Absent”, was reviewed by Donald Kuspit, and on Hyperallergic. She leads Performance Art Open Call, a 17,000 members FB Community.