Natacha Voliakovsky

Natacha Voliakovsky (Buenos Aires, 1988) is an Argentine queer Performance Artist and activist based in New York who develops part of her work in the field of bio-hardcore political performance, with the use of other media such as photography, video, and installation.

She works by exposing and transforming her own body to the limit, with the aim of revealing through her high-impact performance, how those oppressive norms of the dominant culture operate.

Through this proposal, she seeks to the question about the established moral and works on issues related to gender identity, the free sovereignty and autonomy of the body, the identity, the self-perception.

She also explores through interventions and disruptive actions in the public space with themes like migration, power dynamics, abortion, and gender equality, works in which she evidences her perspective of art as a socially transformative tool.

Voliakovsky is the creator of the first digital platform specialized in theoretical research, archive, and heritage, Argentina Performance Art - APA (2018).

One of the platform's activities was a public interview Voliakovsky conducted with artist Marta Minujín.

She established a specific training method in performance art in Argentina.

She participated in group exhibitions and made performances in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, United States, Greece, Guatemala, Finland, India, England, Italy, Uruguay, Czech Republic, Mexico, Turkey, Ukraine, among others.

In the field of bio-hacking, she has surgically intervened her body and made audiovisual records of it, focusing on the intervention over her own corporeality as a form of political activism.

Her academic career began at the Faculty of Architecture, Design, and Urbanism of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) where she obtained a degree in Graphic designer.

She also completed two years of the Bachelor's Degree in Visual Arts at the National University of the Arts (UNA).

She participated in different programs and scholarships.

The most important from Argentina have been awarded by Fondo Nacional de las Artes (National Endowment for the Arts), Fundación Cazadores, Sur Polar (Antártida).

Among the most important international formations were an intensive performance workshop coordinated by the Italian-German artistic duo VestAndPage, in the context of the Venice International Performance Art Week in Venice (Italy, 2018).

The artist collaboratively created the first Argentinian digital platform specialized in performance theory, research, archive, and heritage, called Argentina Performance Art – APA in 2018.

The project was declared of interest by the Legislature of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires through the Office of Cultural Patronage for its contribution to the contemporary art community.

This project arose from the need for this contemporary artistic discipline to be recognized and developed in Argentina.

Her motivation was permeated by several factors: on the one hand the scarce economic contribution that this branch of art receives in the country about its apparently ephemeral and immaterial nature, on the other hand, the little knowledge about its methods even within the same field of art.

Ultimately, the artist detected the absence of specialized training spaces that still associate performance as an art immersed only within the performing arts.

One of its tasks is the documentation of performances in which there was no material record, but there was an oral transmission of the experience, recovered through the archiving of living sources such as artists, historians, critics, and journalists.

The project seeks to preserve the historical and symbolic memory of this particular language by strengthening the work of recording and conservation.

She was also selected in EmergeNYC (New York, 2019), an artistic incubation program of the Hemispheric Institute, with which she developed her site-specific The Weight of the Invisible, which was exhibited at Abrons Arts Center and at NoOsphereArt as part of Greenpoint Open Studios.

In the 2019 – 2020 season she integrated the professional workshop for artists at Creative Capital, a program for Spanish-speaking artists residing in NY.

During these residencies he developed several of her performances, which she later presented in different places

She was part of the 2021 cohort of the INVERSE Program Art Symposium in partnership with The Momentary Museum and the Crystal Bridges Museum (Bentonville, Arkansas).

In the context of this program emerged her work State Control in which she questions the biopolitical power of the state over women and the bodies of persons with uterus.

This work was exhibited at the Argentine Consulate in New York.

The artist constantly reflects on the limits of the standard of feminine beauty.

In various presentations, Voliakovsky exposed her healing process after several surgical interventions by making textual and video records of each phase of recovery.

Through these procedures of documenting her own body, she embodies the logic and devices of bodily and aesthetic standardization of modern society, to expose and reflect on them concerning time.

One of the most important performances with this treatment are:

Her performances aren't limited to spaces dedicated to art, but also to demonstrations and protest in support of egalitarian gender relations and freedom to make decisions about one's own body.

Her research specializes in the role of public space and social behavior in it.

Participated in the group show Change Makers: Ways of Protest, in collaboration with Swansea Museum, Swansea county council and Fusion, which reflected on art as a form of social protest.

The exhibition consisted of various contemporary artists interacting with the collection of objects and elements that were used in protests and social movements that make up the collection of the Swansea Museum (United Kingdom).

Her latest explorations included the work of identity from a more fluid place in relation to the body itself and addressing the rupture of traditional and naturalized gender conceptions.

Based on this reflection, she also created an Instagram filter where digitality comes into play.

She reflected on the non-moment of identity in which she ambiguously places herself when she undergoes facial surgery.

It was launched to the public in 2020, after two years of previous work.

The platform aims to provide free and open access to knowledge about performance, through historical archives, journalistic articles, research, and conferences and interviews with various references.