Where does history end and a myth begin? This question, this temporal dichotomy, is central to the work of media artist Claudia Joskowicz. Joskowicz is a Bolivian artist, currently splitting her time between Bolivia and New York while also holding a teaching position at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. With over 20 years of experience developing a practice in the pioneering era of video and technology-based art forms, she creates portals into complex narratives rooted in history and memory. 

Joskowicz’s artistic practice is primarily centered around film, video, installation, and digital media. With an academic background in architecture and photography, her work integrates structural and visual elements that force viewers to meditate on how a sense of place and time influence our perceptions of the past. She employs long, slow video footage and often oscillates between film and photography, with her early works incorporating minimalist reenactments. Today, we see her reimagining cinematic staging of landscapes, both urban and natural, where nuanced political dramas unfold in real-time and are restructured with her single-shot and tracking techniques.

Her work builds upon the visionaries of the medium who not only inspired but also mentored her. Learning from the work of people like Bill Viola and studying directly under Peter Campus, she incorporated video and film studies into the foundations of her artmaking. Blending photography and video to unearth these hidden and distorted historical narratives, she takes a structuralist film aesthetic and combines it with her own conceptual framework based on landscape and memory. 

At the core of her work is the idea of the falsity of collective memory. Whether it be the manipulation of the media, the omissions in our historiography, or the nature of a place being imbued with its own history, she asks us to rethink our contemporary social realities. Witnessing her own family’s romanticization and relationships to the events of the past, specifically Bolivia’s role in the Cuban Revolution and the international intervention that ensued, the narratives of power unravel. Claudia Joskowicz’s work becomes a liminal space between cultural myth and reality that may forever remain unknown.