Kiyo Gutiérrez
bocas indomables/untamable mouths
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 17, 6-9 pm
Exhibition on view: April 18 – 25, 2025
On view gallery hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12 – 5pm, and by appointment by contacting kiyoguti@usc.edu
Roski Graduate Gallery (Los Angeles Arts District) 1262 Palmetto St, Los Angeles, CA 90013
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
bocas indomables/untamable mouths is an installation that creates embodied experiences of materials, mythologies, mother-goddesses, writings, dreams and sounds from rebel and disobedient water, creatures, and women that wildly speak from the cracks between worlds. If water has memory, then to tap into its substances means that we can still hear the rushing voices of the things—ancient and future—interrupted and displaced.
bocas indomables/untamable mouths is based on a series of ritual-performances that were activated in collaboration with the L.A. River and the border rivers between Mexico and the United States. Informed by matter’s dynamism and agency, multispecies collaboration, indigenous knowledge, and speculative fabulation, this multidisciplinary project offers alternatives to our dominant water imaginaries and aims to build a closer relationship between bodies of water, humans, and the creatures that inhabit them. Through wearable sculpture, installation, video, sound, photography, and natural dyeing, this exhibition invites audiences to rethink materiality, reflect on the ways colonial history is constructed, and reconsider how we craft and share stories.
bocas indomables/untamable mouths weaves together the stories of the Pacific Lamprey, a jawless fish native to the L.A. River but now extinct; of La Malinche, the enslaved Nahua woman who served as an interpreter for the Spanish conqueror Cortés during the colonization process in what is now Mexico; and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which arbitrarily designated the Rio Grande, the Colorado River and the Gila River as borders.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kiyo Gutiérrez is a Mexican performance artist currently living in L.A. She studied history, only to discover that her path was in the body and it’s potential as a tool of resistance. She started doing performance art as a reaction against the brutal Mexican reality, which is a violent one full of femicides, disappearances, and a constant and insatiable looting towards nature. Kiyo draws on multiple mediums including video, photography, textile, sculpture and sound. Her performance pieces question established order and power, and explore the ties between female oppression and the destructive exploitation of Planet Earth.
Kiyo performs often in public spaces and has participated in International Performance Festivals and exhibitions in Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, Brasil, Italy, Spain and the United States. She also participated in Irrational exhibits 13, Debates, an editorial project for Colección Cisneros, is an alumni of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics of Georgetown University, a recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund, the Macomber Travel Grant, the Fulbright Scholarship and was nominated for the Gilder/Coigney International Theatre Award.
