Adela Goldbard

Adela Goldbard is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher, and filmmaker from Mexico. Her research-driven and socially engaged artistic practice explores the transformative potential of destruction and conflict as aesthetic practices of resistance. She approaches violence as a de-territorialized concept that can be activated as a communal, critical, and anticolonial experience, foregrounding dissident collective memories. She is particularly interested in the generative potential of collectively building, staging, and destroying as methods of critical reflection and social transformation. Drawing on experimental and sensorial ethnography, her work spans video, film, sculpture, photography, sound, installation, text, and traditional crafts including textiles, ceramics, woodwork, and pyrotechnics.

Goldbard has presented more than 25 solo exhibitions, including a mid-career retrospective at Centro de la Imagen (Mexico City, 2024) and a major exhibition at Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City, 2025). Her recent public commissions include a pyrotechnic performance for the Boston Triennial of Public Art (2025) and a socially engaged project with the P’urhépecha community of Arantepacua for the FEMSA Biennial (2020–21). She is currently in post-production on K’allpanakuy Orcconchiskunapi (Rage in the Andes), a feature-length participatory ethnographic fiction created in collaboration with Quechua communities in Chumbivilcas, Peru.

Goldbard holds an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Hispanic Literature from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). A fellow of Mexico’s National System of Artistic Creators (2015–18; 2021–24), she lives and works between Providence and Mexico City.