Carla Bobadilla

Visual artist Carla Bobadilla was engaged for her Fellowship at the Institute for Art Studies, Art Education and Art Mediation at the Department of Art and Communicative Practice at the University of Applied Arts. The intention of the fellowship was to strengthen post- and decolonial perspectives in the field of artistic research and even more art education. Due to her specific artistic practice as well as her research and teaching activities in recent years, Carla Bobadilla was able to make an important contribution here. Among other things, Bobadilla conceived two exhibitions under the title "Translated", which were shown at the Medienwerkstatt Wien. The first exhibition "Cross Patterns" showed a work by Bárbara Palomino Ruiz, which deals with ethnological fictions and invented traditions of the Shipibo-Konibo in the Peruvian Amazon. The second presentation presents an artistic work by Carla Bobadilla, "25 Minutes Journey into the Present," which shows a 25-minute carriage ride through downtown Vienna with a carriage driver who is a dentist from Bolivia. He tells the tourists, who are coming from Miami, in Spanish about the history of Vienna and shows traces of the monarchy that are still visible, while reminiscing about his years as a mobile dentist in the Amazon. This journey forms the heart of the exhibition, which explored media and cultural translation.

Carla Bobadilla is a visual artist living in Vienna. She studied art at the University of Playa Ancha, Valparaíso, Chile and attended the PhD Program at the University of Applied Arts Vienna at the Institute of Cultural Studies from 2004-2008. Since 2009 she has been working on educational interventions in museums and art institutions in Vienna. She taught (2012-2017) at the Institute of Art and Communication at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In 2008 she received the Theodor Körner Award for her documentary work on guest workers in Austrian industrial production. In 2011 she was awarded the Women's Prize of the Austrian Ministry of Culture for the book Sketches of Migration. She is currently working on the art-based research project Austria's Cultural Heritage, in which she seeks to discover traces of the hidden entanglements of colonial history in Vienna.