Biography

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1972. She completed her BA in humanities at the University of Chicago in 1993 and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997, where she studied film and video. Santiago Muñoz is a film and video maker, and the uncontrived, observational style of her art aligns it with the sensibility of documentary film while also blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. Despite its ostensible simplicity, Santiago Muñoz’s work stems from intensive research, observation, and documentation, and she is deeply concerned with the tension between the documentarian’s desire for truth and the artist’s aesthetic concerns. For her, the camera as a tool that can both reveal and fabricate reality. Collaborating with nonactors and encouraging improvisation, Santiago Muñoz explores artifice, authenticity, and narrative, questioning how they shape our understanding of history and identity. She invites the participants in her work to reenact and thereby personally experience events from popular culture, history, and indigenous mythology. Within Archive (Archivo, 2001) alone, the subjects of these recreations range from real occurrences, such as the police murder of an infamous killer and the forcible eviction of three hundred families from a squatter’s village, to poignant but fictional incidents, such as the death of a tightrope walker. By reimagining such events, the actors transcend the limits of their own identities and realities, suggesting the possibility of social and political transformation as they rewrite history and their own role in it. In her video Useless Factory (Fábrica Inútil, 2002), Santiago Muñoz restaged a series of events surrounding layoffs at a factory in Puerto Rico. Though the video begins with a tragically banal scene of factory bosses emotionlessly announcing layoffs, it progresses to more fanciful and buoyant images of workers gathering to observe the sunrise and participate in exuberant wrestling matches atop the blue foam chips produced by the factory. Here, Santiago Muñoz turns her sharp critical eye on the social injustices of global capitalism, yet also intimates utopian alternatives—however small and fleeting—through the actor’s imaginative play and connection to natural beauty. Santiago Muñoz has had solo exhibitions at Espacio 1414, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2008); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2008); Telic Arts Exchange, Los Angeles (2010); and Gasworks, London (2013). Her work has also been included in a number of important group exhibitions including Bienal del Caribe, Museo de Arte Moderno, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (2003); El Museo’s Bienal: The (S) Files, The Selected Files, El Museo del Barrio, New York (2005); Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2007); Careos/Relevos, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan (2010); the Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan, Puerto Rico (2011); and Materia Prima, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Quito (2013). Santiago Muñoz’s honors include the first prize from Certamen Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2002). She lives and works in San Juan.