Born in Cali, Colombia, Ana María Millán currently lives and works in Berlin and Cali.
Her multidisciplinary practice references and resignifies the narratives and visualities of comics, animation, video games or popular culture, to critically question the construction of factual and official history. With an emphasis on Colombia’s recent past and its stereotyped image abroad, the artist assumes the potentialities and possibilities of fiction and fantasy to formulate counter-narratives based on oral, individual and local stories. To present these alternative and necessary perspectives of silenced voices, of anonymous subcultures or the historically excluded, Millán often works in collaboration with others or creates dialogical contexts to develop her projects.
Recently, the artist has worked on video animations with scripts resulting from experiments in live role playing, in which the participants enact and reinterpret well-known characters and villains while incorporating their own subjective relation and memory of them, as well as mirroring the dynamics of the underlying process of collective storytelling. Together with Wilson Díaz, Claudia Patricia Sarria-Macías, Gustavo Racines and Andres Sandoval Alba, Millán is part of the artist collective Helena Producciones responsible for Escuela Móvil de Saberes y Prácticas Sociales since 2005, and the Cali Performance Festival since 1997.
Her group shows include Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Korea (2021); Art Encounters Biennial, Timisoara, Romania (2019); El ruido de las cosas al caer, FRAC Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur, Marseille (2017); Immortality for all, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin (2016); Ir para Volver, 12 Bienal de Cuenca (2014). She has also presented her work in solo exhibitions such as Elevación, MAMBO – Museo de Arte Moderno Bogotá (2019); Ana María Millán – a solo exhibition, Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2018); Frío en Colombia, Archivo General de la Nación, Bogotá (2015).
Olivia Ardui for tropical papers
For more information:
http://anamariamillan.info/
http://www.helenaproducciones.org/