Adriana Bustos (B. 1965, Argentina) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Buenos Aires, whose work consists in different interconnected chapters based on historical, social and cultural phenomena.
Bustos’ approach is research-based: history, as incarnated in images, is her raw material. She has addressed subjects such as the effects of extractives practices on nature; the colonial imaginary; the patriarchal gaze, repression of ideas and of difference. By re-contextualizing the found images through juxtaposition and montage, she examines how historical knowledge is constructed and how it affects our experiences today.
She has employed photography, video, sculpture yet laborious, detailed drawing is very much at the core of her approach to art-making, an alchemy through which the images’ energetic load is reworked when filtered by the artist’s eye and hand.
Bustos has exhibited her work extensively in over 70 shows, most recently at the Sharjah Biennial (2019); Cosmopolis 2 at Centre Pompidou (2019) and the 2020 Dhaka Art Summit. Other exhibitions include Unsettled Landscapes, Site Santa Fe, USA, 2014; The As-If Principle, Magazin4 Kunstverein, Bregenz, Austria, 2015; the XII Istambul Biennial; solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla and León (MUSAC), Spain in 2017 and at the Klemm Foundation, Buenos Aires in 2018. Her works are in many public collections including the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museum Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Kadist Foundation, San Francisco, USA; Museum of
Contemporary Art of Medellín, Colombia; Museum of Contemporary Art of Lisbon, Portugal; Casa di Rizparmo Foundation, Modena, Italy; Asiacity Foundation, Singapore; Sharjah Art Foundation, Emirates and Banco de la República de Colombia.