Paula Cordoba

The image depicts a close-up detail of an ornate rococo object or sculpture.

Paula Cordoba. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentinian/American visual artist and researcher.

Paula Córdoba thinks about aesthetics, cultural heritage, and the power relations that shape contemporary societies. Her research-centered practice traces relationships between art, cultural studies, and design. Córdoba creates installations, large format pieces, and objects crossing through these disciplines.

She worked for various museum and exhibition spaces in Buenos Aires as a curatorial assistant and served as a teaching assistant for Professor Rodolfo Agüero at Universidad Nacional de las Artes.

Córdoba presented her artistic research in decolonial studies at postgraduate conferences at University of Glasgow (UK) and University of Giessen (Germany).

Her work has been shown widely in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Argentina.

Postgraduate Education

2023 MA in Sculpture, Royal College of Art, London, UK

2022 MA in Artistic and Cultural Heritage in Colonial South America, Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina

2019 Postgraduate in Critical Writing and Arts Marketing, Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA), Buenos Aires, Argentina

2011 Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Arts, Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London (UAL), London, UK

Awards: The Big Show Awardee, Lawndale Art Center (2022), Art Project Grant, Fondo Metropolitano de la Cultura, las Artes y las Ciencias (2012), Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Selected Publications

2021 Baulo, Maria Carolina. “Texturas visuales, una conversación con Paula Córdoba,” Sculpture Magazine

2016 Ryder, Josh and Melissa Hilborn. “Peripheral Arteries meets Paula Córdoba,” Peripheral Arteries

Selected exhibitions: Withstand (Holocaust Museum Houston, US), Illumination 2021 (Cameron Art Museum, US), LatinXhibition, (Arts Council of Fayetteville, US), The Big Show (Lawndale Art Center, US), Agosto (Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Argentina), Form of intimacy, Solo exhibition (Central Saint Martins, UAL, London, UK).

Link to CV

My practice tackles hybrid identities, the social construction of heritage, and the power relationships that shape it. My pieces often reference neo-classical imagery from architectural façades in a state of transformation.

By appropriating this historical imagery, I revisit the communicative value of the ornament – a constant within my work- as a rhetorical discourse. I find this iconography to hold an intimate evocative power, while its political implications perform at a cultural level as expressions of social values, status, and order.

Abolishing the Western dual thinking that separates nature/culture and human/thing, hybridity takes over my work combining theatrical, sensual, and neo-baroque exuberance. The piece conveys the coexistence of cultural artifacts undergoing metamorphoses and instability, balancing between abstraction and representation, syncretism and distinctiveness.

Displaying an organic flow, the objects’ physicality suggests that frontiers not only separate and exclude, but also invite us to rethink intersections, singularities, and different forms of belonging.

Within my work, I have developed an interdisciplinary approach as the result of my academic studies in Museum studies and Latin-American colonial artistic and cultural heritage.

From a decolonial perspective, I explore heritage not only as a product of the past but also as an ever-evolving process, questioning established narratives and facing us with the dilemma of what we wish to pass on to future generations.

Paula Cordoba

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Royal College of Art