Caroline Ricca Lee
Caroline Ricca Lee (1990, São Paulo, Brasil) delves into archiving and memory from decolonial and feminist perspectives. Works with sculpture, installation, critical writing, performance, and video.
Through imagination and politics of representation, examines an unofficial memory preserved in alternative documentation such as personal stories, ancestral memorabilia, family photographs. The household is an extension of an imagined motherland. Lee examines “home” as an unofficial museum, questioning the institutional appropriation of meanings attributed to domestic objects and marginalized artistic practices in the History of Art by markers of race, gender, sexuality, nation, or generation (such as textiles and ceramics).
The syncretic gaze and chaotic aesthetic of Ricca’s production reveal a repertoire in which Asian ancestry, Brazilian culture, European structural-colonial heritage collide to create a noisy body of work inherent to the tapestry of a multicultural identity. By object-making, Lee reclaims the body and symbolizes an ancestral unspeakable, thus offering an alternative understanding of a collective contemporary archive of memories.
Selected exhibitions: The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean (America’s Society, New York, 2024); Ana Mendieta: silhueta de fogo | terra abrecaminhos (SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, 2023); 1st National Contemporary Art Hall of Goiás (Museum of Contemporary Art of Goiás, Goiânia, 2022); 31° Exhibition Program (Cultural Center of São Paulo, São Paulo, 2021); Curação (Cultural Center of São Paulo, São Paulo, 2020). The artist was awarded the Prize ISOLA SICILIA 2023 at 30th Artissima Art Fair (Torino, Italy) and nominated for the PIPA Prize 2023. They were also artist-in-residence at residenzPLUSbrasil16 (Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Waldberta, Munich, 2016).
Exhibitions
