Bio

Elektra KB is a Latinx artist, originally from Colombia, living and working in Brooklyn, NY. They graduated with an MFA from Hunter College in 2016 and received a DAAD award, pursued at UDK--Berlin with artist Hito Steyerl.

KB grew up in a rural hospital in Colombia with an army of nurses, doctors and cooks, as the result of a Cold War era Soviet-Colombian union.

They want to engage corporeal sickness, disability, and chronic pain with utopian possibilities and alternative universes.

Their work entangles queer networks of care and mutual aid, political thought, communication, and actions, often with a documentarian/sci-fi hybrid style functioning within two parallel universes. Across: photography, textiles, video, installation and performance. They reveal and explore mechanisms of utopias and dystopias, juxtaposed with our world.

KB also investigates issues of abuse of power, gender, migration and transculturality. KB made a stateless-genderless passport written about in ArtNews among a myriad of publications. A video about trans political prisoner Marius Mason titled: “Bodies of Water: Body as a Prison/Prison as a Body and a banner for Act Up’s 30 Year old Anniversary shown at: “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall” at the Brooklyn Museum, NY’, among other memorable works. Their most recent show was: ‘My Body Is The House That We Live in’ at the Gibney.

Their work has also been written about in the New York Times, BOMB magazine; and has been acquired by the Yinchuan Museum of Contemporary Art and The Fondation Pour l'art Contemporain Salomon.

STATEMENT

KB’s practice is interdisciplinary encompassing mainly: Video, photography, sound, performance and textile works. Her work addresses concerns such as migration and global power dynamics trough a platform of mythology; coexisting with a documentarian and conceptualist approach. Her work takes place in the middle of two worlds: the ‘Cathara Autonomous Territory’ and our world. The Theocratic Republic of Gaia is a utopian-dystopian world; a parallel universe fighting between the tensions built on a totalitarian state and the revolutionary Cathara Insurgency, situating itself close to the political sci-fi genre. Her body of work is of a performative nature concerned with the post-colonial and decolonial discourse. It is charged with critical humor and informed by the aesthetics of colonial art tropes and the ongoing armed conflict she grew up with.

KB’s site-specific installations and works on fabric deal with: the body, gender, mobility, immigration, the nature of power, authority and its antagonists. From the prison industrial complex to authority symbols –such as the immigration checkpoint—, adding protest signs as responses and visual cues of shifting power. Exploring the meanings and relationships of the concept of power and how it manifests today in society.

Her work ties utopism, political theory, art and activism through a variety of mediums.

• CV HERE
• PORTFOLIO HERE (PDF)

Contact
Email: kb.elektra@gmail.com
Instagram: instagram.com/elektrakb

• Disability Access Rider