Claudia Joskowicz is an artist who works primarily with film, video, installation, and digital media. Her practice centers on history and its narrative, considering how popular media circulates and shapes collective memory, contemporary history, and social realities. Using long and slow video footage and oscillating between film and photography, she reproduces moments captured from global collective memories and personal stories (her own and others') that have a historical dimension and are anchored in her native Latin American landscape. For most of her career, she has focused on the Latin American landscape, producing work in her home country of Bolivia and South America at large. Her early video work was staged as minimalist reenactments - with attention to the figure and the landscape and honing in on gesture and subtle movement - and has moved towards re-imagined cinematic stagings of landscapes, urban and otherwise, where nuanced political drama unfolds in real time. The landscape and built environment are main characters throughout her work, as are the structural elements, drawing attention to the media's role in constructing historical events, and our memories of them.
Joskowicz has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, and her work is is in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, NY; the Kadist Foundation, San Francisco; the Cisneros Fontanals Foundation, Miami; and the Banco Central de la República, Bogotá. Joskowicz has received numerous awards and grants including a NYFA Fellowship in film/video, an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a Cisneros Fontanals Foundation Mid Career Artist's Commission, a Guggenheim fellowship in film/video, and a Fulbright Scholar award. She has been a fellow at Yaddo; the Latin American Roaming Art Project, Oaxaca, Mexico; the Sacatar Institute, Bahia, Brazil; the AIM program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY; and the LMCC's Workspace and Paris residencies.