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Elyla

Elyla (Chontales, 1989) is a performance artist and activist from Nicaragua, Central America. Their work deals with creating resistance to colonial, imperialist, and Western ideologies around the construction of identity politics and nation-state cultural narratives, specifically regarding mestizaje, queerness (cochoneidad), and indigenous ancestry. 

Elyla has presented their work at the IX/X Biennial of Nicaragua, IX/X Central American Biennials, and the XII Biennial of Havana, Cuba, and will be part of the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Elyla is committed to researching how decolonial reflections can lead to a community-based anti-colonial artistic praxis in Central America. The artist coined the term barro-mestiza to take distance from the traditional and colonial understanding of mestizaje during their ongoing process of decolonization. Elyla is an Artist Protection Fund Fellow by the Institute of International Education (IIE) at Bucknell University, supported by the Samek Art Museum, and a 2020 EmergenNYC Fellow. They are a 2021 Seed Awardee and are part of the 2024 Moving Narratives Mentorship Award Cohort by the Prince Claus Fund. The artist’s early work dealt with contesting the patriarchal and repressive narratives upheld by the Latin American left and its effect on gender and sexually diverse people. 

In 2013, Elyla co-founded the Operación Queer/Cochona collective that blurred the limits between academia, art, and activism creating interventions in Mesoamerica. Their project, Machete Dress, was a grant recipient of the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) 16th annual Grants & Commissions Program. Their work is part of the permanent collection at the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, the Ortiz-Gurdian Art Foundation, and the KADIST videoart collection. They currently live and work in Masaya, Nicaragua. 

More about the artist and their practice: https://elyla.art

Related works in the collection
Elyla
Torita-encuetada, 2023