Artist in residence, Stockholm, 3 March–1 April 2025

Patricia Bentancur is an artist-curator based in Uruguay. Her practice employs conceptual strategies, combining objects, videos, texts, publications, and the curatorship of participatory projects. Engaging the audience as co-creators, Bentancur aims to foster dialogue through works that inspire new questions about contemporary issues that are often overlooked or underestimated.

Her works function as pieces of an archive where global and local scenarios coexist. She seeks to decentralise the gaze and challenge the notion that a problem is not ours simply because of geographic, cultural, or religious distance. In doing so, Bentancur offers a contextualisation of existence rather than a literal representation of it.

Patricia Bentancur

During her IASPIS residency, Bentancur will explore the margins between curatorial and visual practices by examining the concepts of language and home in relation to borders, territory, and identities. Drawing on Paul B. Preciado’s idea of the body as a political territory and home as a transcendent experience, she will also incorporate the perspectives of Rita Segato and Silvia Federici to investigate how language both reinforces inequalities and provides tools for resistance.

Bentancur studied architecture in Uruguay and Spain, specialising in contemporary art spaces. She graduated from The Printmaking School and the School of Theatre Design and pursued studies in Semiotics and Philosophy of Art under Dorothee Baur Willert. As a former Fulbright/Academic Program Researcher (1996-2000), she conducted research at the Guggenheim Museum and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, where she also earned an MFA from New York University.

She curated the Uruguay Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2019, 2015, 2009) and co-curated the Biennale/MVD The Big South (2012). Recently, as part of Colectiva COCO, she contributed to A Decolonial Feminist Critique of Art in Uruguay (2023) and An Exhibition History of Latin American Art, commissioned by the ISLAA/Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, New York (2023). She has exhibited extensively in Uruguay and internationally.