Joaquín Sánchez
Bio
oaquín Sánchez (Paraguay, 1975) is a Paraguayan visual artist and curator, naturalized Bolivian, based in La Paz since 1998. His multidisciplinary practice spans installation, performance, video, object, photography, set design and costume design, shaped by Guaraní culture, contemporary mestizaje, and notions of border, memory and territory. Much of his recent work revolves around war and frontiers: the Guerra Grande (1870), the Guerra del Pacífico (1879) and the Guerra del Chaco (1932–1935) — a line of inquiry that gave rise to one of his emblematic pieces, Chaco, mundo de mis mundos (2012), an installation of 400 hearts carved in wood.
PROYECTOR
Arte-sur
He has taken part in the Venice, Havana, Mercosur, São Paulo and Valencia biennials and the Chile Triennial, among other group exhibitions, and represented Bolivia at Documenta 14 (Kassel and Athens), among nine Latin American curators. He served as general curator of the 9th and 10th SIART International Art Biennial (Bolivia), as artistic director and curator of Fundación Cinenómada, and founded the alternative training space Comunidad AVISPERO. In film, he worked as production designer and art director on Bolivian features such as Zona Sur, Yvy Maraëy and Soren. He currently directs artistic projects at Tranvía 13 (Asunción), where in 2023 he developed the residency Estación Lab/13 for young creators, supported by Paraguay's National Secretariat of Culture.
Statement
Joaquín Sánchez's work is rooted in his early connection to the travelling cinema with which his grandfather journeyed through the rural communities of Paraguay. That experience shaped a creative process that, though it unfolds across installations, objects, performances and video art, always adheres to a cinematic narrative.
Sánchez is drawn to family chronicles and personal memory. He rewrites and reinterprets stories, resignifying myths in pieces that, like palimpsests, retain their original traces. Border territories recur throughout his work. There, landscape, the ancestral world and the events of war intertwine, offering a study of the human condition that explores popular and Indigenous culture and the frictions between different national realities.
His works explore political, social, cultural and personal conflicts in a narrative key.
2.5 x 4m / 98.4 x 157 in
