Chelsea, New York
Liliana Porter
A Video Program
Dia ChelseaA prominent figure in the early Conceptual and feminist art movements, Liliana Porter contests the spaces between reality and fiction across a variety of media. Central to her long-standing research is the subject of time—which she perceives as nonlinear and dislocated—manifest in the artist’s early prints and photographic works from the 1970s, later images and installations from the 1990s incorporating found objects and collected figurines, and, most recently, her films and plays. By creating unexpected scenes that are both humorous and intriguing, Porter employs, almost as a sort of conceptual trap, playful strategies to reflect on political and otherwise contentious subject matter, as well as philosophical questions concerning time, reality, and representation. Liliana Porter was born in Buenos Aires in 1941. She studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires and Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Originally trained in printmaking, Porter has evolved a practice that spans painting, drawing, photography, video, installation, and, more recently, theater, the latter often developed in collaboration with artist Ana Tiscornia. In 1964, Porter moved to New York where she co-founded the New York Graphic Workshop with artists Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo. In the city, her work was first shown in institutions such as the Jewish Museum in 1964; Pratt Graphic Art Center in 1967; and the Museum of Modern Art in 1973. Between 1991 and 2007, Porter was a professor at Queens College, City University of New York. In 2008, Dia commissioned Porter’s first web-based work, Rehearsal, for the Artist Web Projects initiative. In 2017, her work was included in the 57th Venice Biennale: Viva Arte Viva and Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, which traveled in 2018 to the Brooklyn Museum, New York, and the Pinacoteca, São Paulo. Recent surveys of her work have been presented at Artium Museoa, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del País Vasco, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain (2017); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2017–18), and traveling to El Museo del Barrio, New York (2018–19); and Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, France (2023). Porter lives in Rhinebeck, New York.