Marisa Cornejo

About

Artists

Events

Installation View

Iván Navarro & Courtney Smith

Johanna Unzueta

Cecilia Vicuña

Ink and watercolor to show colorful heads with long necks watching an individual. 44.5 cm × 37 cm / 17.51 × 14.56 inches — The Hole of Addiction, 2016

Two individuals conversing, ink and watercolor on paper, 48 × 36 cm / 18.89 × 14.17 inches — Hoyo, 2002-2010

Two individuals facing eachother and a woman in pink scowling at the man. Ink and watercolor on paper, 29.50 x 42 cm / 11.61 × 16.53 inches — I Don’t Want To Cook Anymore, 2008

Marisa Cornejo’s work comes from dreams, memories, and history. Most often, this is her personal history and memories of her family and life during their exile from Chile and the reverberations of this flight, particularly that of her father. Recently, she published L’empreinte. Une archive d’artiste soustraite au terrorisme d’État (The Imprint: An Artist’s Archive Rescued from State Terrorism), published by art & fiction, 2023. That work is based on the artifacts of her father Eugenio Cornejo (1940-2002), a committed artist and teacher, the victim of political imprisonment and torture under Pinochet’s dictatorship. He later became a refugee with no status, who died as an alcoholic in exile, and who never received any form of recognition or compensation from the State of Chile. Through performance, research, dreams, drawings, and other media, Cornejo interrogates how the body translates the legacies of the coup, torture, and historical memory as it is passed down from one generation to the next.

Marisa Cornejo circulates between Chile, France, and Switzerland. Starting in 1994, when studying visual arts at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, she began drawing her dreams as a personal diary. Since then, this has been the basis of her artistic practice, a practice for giving voice to and interrogating her body as an archive of the history of forced migration.

Marisa grew up in the midst of the coup d’état of Chile in the early 1970s. Her practice opens a dialogue with the many layers and knots of that event. She uses her dreams to inspire real-life performances, interviews, paintings, textiles, films and texts. One of her recent projects – La Huella – uses a dream to revisit the places of memory to activate her father’s archive as a refugee. This work was created as part of her master’s research in visual arts and critical studies at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD) in Switzerland.