Denisse Griselda Reyes

Straddling the lines of assimilation, refuge, and self-preservation, my current work interrogates the boundaries of representation by publicly engaging with memory. Across a range of media including painting, video, film, sculpture, performance, and installation, my practice engages with themes of memory and hauntology. I use photographic and video archives to ground my research practice in the (in)visible social structures of modern life, whether the torment of the Salvadoran Civil War or the awkwardness of a first date. Young girls with fierce gazes become protagonists in my paintings, while fragments from home videos, MRIs, ultrasounds, and even vitrines of childhood teeth reassemble into sculptural forms that generate new realities. These archival excavations and recompositions transform the act of preservation into mythmaking, allowing me to trace the ghosts of our sociological imagination. Gaps in my family dramas are filled with reenactments of my own experiences, where I perform as my alter-ego Griselda, an indignant iconoclast who is part-narrator, part-drag-persona, and part-survival-strategy. In my short films, I use humor embodied through a complex contemporary figure to push against the limited Latinx narrative of pain and suffering. In this balance between tragedy and pleasure, my work builds an aesthetic language of recuperation and salvage to bridge the fractured histories of post-civil war Salvadoran life and its diaspora. These layered temporalities have shaped exhibitions and screenings at venues such as the Museo Reina Sofía, The Jewish Museum, White Columns, A.I.R. Gallery, Real Art Ways, the Bodega Film Festival, MECA Art Fair, and the Centro Cultural de España en El Salvador. Through these different mediums, my work seeks to negotiate an agreement with the present moment rather than with a distant future, exploring how close one can get to reality before losing touch with it.

Why Performance Studies?

Performance Studies offers a critical space to investigate how embodied practices, memory, and representation shape our understanding of the self and the world. I was drawn to the field’s emphasis on interdisciplinarity, theory, and experimentation to further explore performance as an art form and methodology for research.