MIA EVE
Mia Eve Rollow is a nomadic artist whose practice seeks to contravene in disabling acts of power. Her site-specific, community-engaged performance, murals, video, and sculptures cultivate terrains of spiritual, social, and cultural resistance. In 2009, Rollow cofounded EDELO (En Donde Era La ONU/ Where the United Nations Used to Be), a community-engaged residency project in Chiapas, Mexico. I have worked with dispossessed communities across Mexico, Chile, Palestine, Cuba, and Senegal, collectively creating multifaceted art projects about issues of mobility. I have collaborated with freedom fighters, asylum seekers, land-back communities, laborers, people with physical disabilities (often resulting from state violence), and others. Working with these communities, my practice emerges through performance, murals, and sculptural public interventions, giving form to an aesthetic language of liberation that transcends state, ideological, and physical borders.
Rollow’s work has been featured most recently in a survey exhibition at UC Santa Cruz. It's been also shown in The Red Cat Gallery, New York; Casa de Americas, Cuba; Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Canada; Paco das Artes, Brazil; Reina Sofia Museum, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Mexico City; Kunsthalle Wien Museum, Vienna; Contemporary Art Space, Uruguay; and Museo de Moneda, Chile. Rollow’s practice has featured in books, including The Art of Accompaniment: Visualizing Displacement in the Americas (Upcoming, Duke UP) and Zapentera Negra, as well as journals including Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Barbarie Pensar Con Otros, and Momus. She is currently an artist-in-resident at UCSC. Rollow received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
I am an artist that is living and creating with a disability. I became paraplegic in 2007 with a near death experience that opened a deep understanding of a shared pain and resilience that is felt by over one-billion disabled people worldwide making us the world’s biggest minority, an expanding number due to heightened environmental catastrophes and a world run by supremist values. Since then I have recognized my body as a political territory, and the communal body as well, a place where we can demand safety and integrated multidimensional health as a basic human right.
My collaborative work sees the body as the carrier of memory, both of traumas, violence, as well as of wisdom and resilience. When the body, ritual, and the object is juxtaposed within environments of tension, then the very histories of the body can manifest its knowledge. This becomes the center of my work, exploring painting, sculpture, performance as ritual, oral histories, invisible theater and video documentation as a form of demanding a hyper visibility that otherwise would not exist without the arts. Life is a Dream
