Kinga Araya
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Kinga Araya is a conceptual artist and scholar who lives in Montréal, Canada. Her interdisciplinary artworks (drawing, sculpture, photography, video and performance art) investigate movement (walking) and communication (talking). The formal and conceptual hybridization within Araya’s studio art practice is a result of intellectual sublimation of her artistic and personal displacements (during the summer of 1988, while on a student trip, she literally walked away from communist Poland, defecting in Florence, Italy). She welcomes interdisciplinary artistic approaches because they help her to unravel the complexity of our world and challenge the socio-cultural space where the meaning is circular and it seems to collapse.
In the Spring 2004 she completed doctoral studies in the Special Individualized Program at Concordia University in Montréal. Her doctoral research was twofold: studio art practice and critical theory. Therefore her doctoral thesis consisted of an art exhibition and an academic paper. The thesis paper, “Walking in the City: Motif of Exile in Performances by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Adrian Piper,” investigated two art performances involving walking in the city that are conceptualized as exilic works of art: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Vehicle, performed in Warsaw in 1973, and Adrian Piper’s Catalysis, performed from 1970 to 1971, in New York City. Araya’s doctoral thesis exhibition, “Prosthetic Self,” visualized some of her concerns regarding a contemporary performing identity. The exhibition consisted of a sculptural installation (105 pairs of used wooden crutches and audio).
She also holds a Master of Fine Arts (Visual Arts) from York University in Toronto and two Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Arts and Art Theory & History with an Italian Literature minor from University of Ottawa in Ottawa, all of which were completed with High Academic Distinctions. Her experience in art history dates back to 1986 when she was a student at the Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), Poland. During her two years at KUL, she studied ancient, medieval, and renaissance art history in conjunction with philosophy of art and critical theory.