For its second participation to NADA New York, N.A.S.A.L. presents Antimundo by Estefania Puerta (b. 1988, Manizales, Colombia)
Estefania Puerta works with organic and inorganic materials to explore transformation, translation, and the worlds that emerge through recontextualization. Her practice—rooted in world-building, shape-shifting, and border crossing—draws on psychoanalysis, folklore, and her experiences with immigration to question what is labeled “natural” or “alien.”
Puerta is the 2024 Philip Guston Rome Prize recipient. Her work has been exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Nina Johnson Gallery, Palazzo Esposizioni, Lyles and King, Micki Meng Gallery, and in the 2022 New England Triennial. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art and lives between Vermont and New York.**
Considering the historic use of amulets as vessels for reclaiming agency and imbuing materials with mythic potential, Puerta’s solo presentation of small sculptures and reliefs reflects on how to remake the world. As the world turns immigrants into aliens, uteruses into weapons, nature into property, and touch into a digital ghost, these works explore how we might carry time, touch, and place back into new bodies. Puerta is particularly interested in embedding her own body and place into the work, treating these pieces as migrating bodies that hold both history and future. Whether through her hair, images of her body, or the bristles she uses to clean her studio, she transforms these traces into forms that question the utility or sentience of a thing and how we identify these forms as familiar or foreign, comforting or threatening.