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CAROLINE GARCIA
b. Sydney, Australia 1988
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NYC

Caroline is a culturally promiscuous, interdisciplinary artist. She works across performance, moving image, and installation through a hybridized aesthetic of cross-cultural movement, embodied research, and new media. Her practice traverses a highly personalized aggregation of distinct systems that interlace ethnotraditional forms of knowledge (such as dance, botany, poetry, and ceramics) with digital technologies (including green screening, robotics, motion capture, extended realities (AR/VR), and 3D processes). Her aesthetic approach is often humorous and playful, and at times irreverent.

Caroline’s practice is shaped by alterity. In her work, she centers peripheral bodies by assuming the role of shape shifter - sliding into the gaps between cultures and experiences of otherness. Using found footage, archives, and artifacts, she digitally samples popular culture and colonial imagery to critically re-appropriate problematic narratives of cultural representation, further complicating them through cultural cannibalism. Her practice involves a reimagining of forgotten choreographies and an intersectional approach to providing alternate ways of viewing images of the past that eschew classical myths. Her motive is to create archipelagic constellations through her research to provide links between the past, present, and future.

Caroline is committed to centering Indigenous protocol and addressing diasporic ontologies and its privileges. With this at the forefront, she experiments with digital technologies as a schema to out manoeuvre the hegemonic forces that oppress and as a tool to migrate gestures and ritual into speculative landscapes. Her work embraces the rupture and the glitch as spaces to be filled with possibility and as strategies of resistance. Flirting with transgressions, she welcomes the potency of rage and refusal as renditions of criticality for non-hegemonic bodies.

Caroline’s current body of work resists assimilation tactics across the transpacific through a critical engagement with violence, grounded in a deeply personal excavation of grief and matrilineal loss. Citing a lineage of Guerrilleras from the Philippine Islands, she proposes unique renderings of survival strategies informed by elements of Indigenous Filipino culture and traditions rooted in ritual headhunting and martial arts. By initiating her own recuperation of violence, Caroline creates gateways for both self and collective actualization and preservation to engage with larger systemic themes of identity, immigration, and safety. 

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Caroline is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow: Digital/Electronic Arts, a 2021 New York Artadia Awardee, a 2021-22 Franklin Furnace Fund recipient, and the 2018/19 American Australian Association’s AUSART Fellow. She has presented work at The Shed, Lincoln Center, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Smack Mellon, Creative Time Summit X, and The Vera List Center, among others (all NYC); and internationally at The Sydney Opera House, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Manila Biennale, Art Central Hong Kong, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, Galerie Tanja Wagner, and Salzburger Kunstverein, among others. She was an artist in residence at the EMPAC in 2016/17, The Studios at MASS MoCA in 2019, awarded the Edwards Charitable Giving Trust Residency at ISCP in 2020 & 2023, a Tech Resident at Pioneer Works, as well as an Experimental Projects resident at the Institute for Electronic Arts in 2021. She was a Wave Hill Winter Workspace artist, a CultureHub Resident, a Recess Session artist for 2021-22, and in the LMCC Workspace program for 2022-23. Caroline is an MFA in Fine Arts graduate from Parsons The New School of Art, Media, and Technology.

Caroline has presented at The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, The Australian Center of the Moving Image, The Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, and The Sydney Opera House; as well as DARK MOFO, RISING Festival, Channels: The Australian Video Art Festival, Proximity Festival, Underbelly Arts Festival, NEXT WAVE, The Festival Of Live Art, Junction Arts Festival, Sydney Contemporary, and Art Month Sydney, among others. She has exhibited at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, the Center of Contemporary Photography, Carriageworks, The SUBSTATION, Firstdraft, Federation Square, Blacktown Arts Centre, Bankstown Arts Centre, Penrith Regional Gallery and the Lewers Bequest, Cement Fondu, and Darren Knight Gallery, among others.



Image Credit: Studio Portrait (2017) by Alex Wisser, courtesy of Parramatta Artists Studios