JUAN CARLOS GUERRERO-HERNÁNDEZ

Research

Research Collaboration

A large, open research table covered with carefully arranged high-quality reproductions of artworks from different continents: a Renaissance drawing, a Mughal miniature, an Aboriginal dot painting, an Ottoman manuscript illumination, and a contemporary installation photograph. Transparent plastic sleeves, color-calibration cards, and small annotation sticky flags in muted tones suggest active scholarly work. Natural daylight from the left mixes with a desk lamp’s warm glow from the right, creating a nuanced interplay of shadows. Shot from a top-down, bird’s-eye perspective in photographic realism, with meticulous sharpness across the entire scene, the mood is analytical yet creative, highlighting the comparative and cross-cultural nature of global art history research.

Research

My interdisciplinary research in global contemporary art and visual cultures combines art history, visual and cultural studies, gender and performance studies, decolonial methods, as well as philosophy, media archeology, and anthropology.

Current research projects (click on each to know more):

Performative Walls: Street Art, Social Media, and Decolonization in 21th-century Social Protests.

It discusses street art as an expanded visual and performative practice concerning public space, artivism, collective memory, old and new media, and social and indigenous movements in the last decade. This project involves a in-progress book, articles published or in process, and invited talks:

  • In-progress book: Performative Walls: Street Art and Social Protest
  • 2025. “A Mural-Graffiti in Medellín: Fighting for the territory” Graffiti and Street Art 3(2): 48-63. Special issue: “Inscribed Territories: Informal Governance”. https://doi.org/10.48619/gsa.v3i2.A1250
  • 2025. Talk. Performative Walls: Street Art and Decolonizing Heritage: A Case in Popayán. Art History & Visual Culture Studies forum, University of Nevada. December 2.
  • 2025. Paper: Decolonizing Heritage: Multi-vocal, Intergenerational, Intercultural Actions on the Tulcan Pyramid. International Conference Decolonising Cultural Heritage, University for Foreigners of Siena. May 5-7.
  • 2024. Paper: Decolonizing Heritage, Culture, and History: Visual and Performative Interventions in Popayán. Creating Disturbance Conference. University of Johannesburg.
  • 2024. “Music and Protest”. Music Art and Social Movements. UNR and Holland Project. February 28.
  • 2023. “Activism, Textuality, and Feedback in La nueva banda de la terraza’s Graffiti-Projections.” SAUC – Street Art and Urban Creativity, 9(3): 8-22. J https://doi.org/10.25765/sauc.v9i3.803
  • 2023. A decolonial fall on the Tulcan Hill: Between recasting public memory and place, and recovering history and commemoration”. In Fallen Monuments and Contested Memorials. Edited by Juilee Decker (Rochester Institute of Technology). Publisher: Routledge. ISBN 9781032183718. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003256076
  • 2023. Paper: “Street Art, DIWOY-O and Direct Action in 2021 Cali’s Social Outbreak”. 6th International ART and the CITY Conference, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, 3-5 June.
  • 2022. Viral Street Art in Bogota: Contesting State Violence and Engaging Citizenry”. 5th International ART and the CITY Conference, Aarhus University, 23-25 JuneColonial Afterlives: Public Art and the Trans-Pacific World.
Mapuche Futurity in Anita Paillamil’s textiles and activism

This project focuses on the Mapuche master weaver Anita Paillamil’s recent production in the context of the Mapuche decolonial struggle. I discuss how her work invites consideration of Mapuche Futurity in terms of nesting and gestating the past; envisioning Itrofill mogen and küme mogen; and interconnections between weavers, visions, healing, life, and ethics. This project includes the following products:

Nayda Collazo-Llorens’ Abstraction: Queering Cartography and Diaspora

The project on this Puerto Rican artist includes the following products:

Atabi or dancing to find the lost present: A forgotten and pioneering piece of decolonial dance-theater in 1970s Colombia.

Atabí is the first indigenous dance-theater piece in the history of modern theater in Colombia. Based on Fernando González Cajiao’s text, Atabí is as a dance-theater piece.and adaptation and reappropriation orchestrated by Rosario Montaña Cuellar and Delia Zapata Olivella. Even if immediately celebrated, the piece soon had its presentations restricted due to tensions among the theater group. This research project reconstructs the play, design, costumes, and choreography. This project includes:

  • 2026. Vanderbilt Library Travel Grant. Special Colombian collections. Vanderbilt University.
Em/Dis-Bodiments: Cultural Trauma and Contemporary Photography and Video.

This project discusses and conceptualizes the decolonization of cultural trauma in 1990s photography and video. This long project involves a book, several articles and invited talks:

  • In-progress Book: Em/Dis-Bodiments: Cultural Trauma and Contemporary Photography and Video.
  • 2020. “Runa Islam’s Emergence (2011): Reproducing and projecting Antoin Sevruguin’s negative in a time of uprisings.” Cinergie, il Cinema e le altre Arti 17: 31-42 https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2280-9481/10521
  • 2020. “Alberto Baraya’s Decolonial and Posttraumatic Photography: Displaced Difference within Trauma Culture.” Photographies 13.3: 341-364. https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2020.1774920

Previous research projects (click on each to know more):

Geneses of Video and Women video makers: a media archeology of video in 1980s Colombia

This project analyzes and discusses in depth works by women whose video production in the US, Colombia, and Mexico proposed a heterodox history of video and social ontology in the 1980s. This projects involves the following products:

  • Book under review: Subverting the order: Women artists, video, and assemblages in the 1980s.
  • 2023. “The Woman, the Migrant, the Cyborg in In-Pulso.” Writing Never Written: 2023 Art Writing Symposium. Nevada Museum of Art and University of Nevada-Reno. December 1.
  • 2023. “García’s Juegos (1978-1979): puppets, immunity, torture.” In Ventriloquism, Performance, and Contemporary Art. Edited by Isabelle L. Wallace and Jennie Hirsh. Publisher: Routledge. ISBN 9781032290454. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003303978
  • 2022. “De Orfeo a las Ménades: hacia una videopoesía nómada en There is no forgetting de Margarita Becerra Cano [From Orpheus to the Menades: Towards a nomadic Video Poetry in Margarita Becerra Cano’s There is no forgetting].” Revista Chilena de Literatura 106: 487-513. https://revistaliteratura.uchile.cl/index.php/RCL/article/view/68784
  • 2021. “De muertes, círculos, y manos: lo audiovisual en Circus (1989) de Margarita Becerra Cano [On Deaths, Circles, and Hands: The Audio-visual in Margarita Becerra Cano’s Circus (1989)]”. Calle 14: Revista de investigación en el campo del arte, 16(30): 392–407. https://doi.org/10.14483/21450706.18308
  • 2020. “The Threefold topography of performance: Drawing, Action, and Video in María Evelia Marmolejo’s Anónimo 4.” TDR The Drama Review 64.4 (Winter): 129–146. https://doi.org/10.1162/dram_a_00968
  • 2020. “Una utopía artística: juego y televisión en Personalmente T.Video [An artistic utopia: play and television in Personalmente T.Video].” Calle 14 Revista de Investigación en el Campo del Arte, 15(28). https://doi.org/10.14483/21450706.16278
  • 2020. Keynote Speaker. “Seis obras y artistas: Videoarte en los largos años ochenta en Colombia [Six works and six female artists: Video art in the long 1980s in Colombia]”. Seminario Expresiones Artísticas del Videoarte y el Cine Experimental. Medellín, Colombia. October 23. http://www.intermediaciones.org/.
  • 2020. “Video’s movements: Drifts and expansions of video art and video dance”. Central Coloquium of Dance, Universidad de Antioquia. Medellín, Colombia. September 7.
  • 2018. Organization of an Internationl Event: Art and Medium(s) in Contemporary History of art. VIII Symposium of Art History. Universidad de Los Andes. Bogotá, Colombia. October 24-26. Two invited keynote speakers (Caroline Armstrong – Yale, and Andrew Uroskie – Stony Brook), eighteen international speakers, and two local speakers.
  • 2017. “Ricardo Restrepo’s pioneering video art works”. Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogotá, MIDBO. Universidad Javeriana. Bogotá, Colombia. October 31.
The Body and the Ethic and Aesthetic Regimes of Violence

This projects involves the following products:

  • 2015. Talk: “Silent or muted victims and witnesses? Paradoxes in Doris Salcedo’s artwork.” MCA Talk: Doris Salcedo Panel (Exhibition). Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and DePaul University. Chicago (IL), USA. April 7.
  • 2015. “Corte de florero, simulacros y testimonio de la violencia [Flower cut vase, simulacra and testimonies of violence].” In Pensar el arte hoy: El cuerpo, edited by Carlos Sanabria, 174-191. Bogotá: Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano. ISBN 9789587251630. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2175p7q.13.
  • 2010. “Emblemas, cuerpo y memoria colectiva [Emblems, body and collective memory].” In Premio nacional de crítica: ensayos sobre arte contemporáneo en Colombia, 111-136. Bogotá: Universidad de Los Andes and Colombian National Ministry of Culture. ISSN: 2145-59-10.
  • 2010. “Cuerpos en dolor (I) imágenes emblemáticas del régimen ético de la violencia [Bodies in Pain (I): emblematic images of violence’s ethical regime]” In Revista de Estudios Sociales 35 (2010): 123-137. https://doi.org/10.7440/res35.2010.11
  • 2007. Art Criticism National Prize: “Unland: The Orphan’s Tunic. La escultura como lugar del testimonio y trazo de la memoria.” In Premio nacional de crítica: ensayos sobre arte contemporáneo en Colombia, tercera versión, 11-37. Bogota: Universidad de Los Andes and National Ministry of Culture. ISBN: 978-958-695-294-1
Public Art in Colombia

This projects includes the following products:

A large, meticulously detailed world map composed entirely of miniature painted canvases, each panel showing a different artistic style from various cultures and centuries. The map lies flat on a richly grained dark wooden table scattered with open art history books, archival notes, and a brass magnifying glass. Soft, diffused daylight from an unseen window grazes the surface, creating gentle highlights on the varnished paint and subtle shadows between the panels. Photographic realism at eye-level with a slightly elevated angle, sharp focus across the map, and a calm, scholarly mood, conveying the breadth of global art history in a clean, professional, and modern aesthetic.

Research Collaboration

We explore and study global art histories, postcolonial and decolonial methodologies, transnational, intermedial and transmedial issues and practices.

Colonial Afterlives: Public Art and the Trans-Pacific World.

With Nicholas Parkinson (American University of Paris), and in connection with the multilingual research network Global Peripheries, we have been leading this research project on an the hardly explored area of Public Art in the Transpacific context. This project includes the following products and events:

  • 2027. Colonial Afterlives Public Art and the Trans-Pacific World. Online Conference. University of Nevada, Reno.
  • 2027. Public Art Dialogue Special Issue: Colonial Afterlives Public Art and the Trans-Pacific World
Revisiting Red Sorghum: Chinese Cinema and Intermediality

This project developed with Yanshuo Zhang (Pomona Collage) has involved:

  • 2024. “Sensual Excess and Affective Intermediality: Disturbing the Cinematic Discourse in Red Sorghum”. Intermedial Connections: Impurity in the Arts, 7th Conference Narrative, Media and Cognition. Theatre and Film School – Lisbon Polytechnic Institute. May 8-10.
  • 2023. co-authored with Yanshuo Zhang, “Intermediality and Performative Cultural Communication in Red Sorghum.” Affective Intermediality Conference. Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, CLUJ-NAPOC. October, 20-21
Performance Philosophy – Colombian Chapter

I have lead, with the support of colleagues at different institutions in Colombia at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Universidad Jorge tadeo Lozano, and Universidad del Norte this chapter of the international Performance Philosophy Research Network. I have organized the following events:

  • 2022. Speaker. “Koré’s Mirrors: Between Persephone and Demeter, between dance and theater”. Inaugural Lecture opening the academic year of the Humanities Faculty. Universidad del Norte. Barranquilla, Colombia August 4.
  • 2018. Resistance, Dissidence, Incidence. Second Colombian Symposium of Performance Philosophy. Second Colombian Symposium of Philosophy of Performance. Bucaramanga, Colombia. August 17.
  • 2016. First Colombian Symposium of Performance Philosophy. Barranquilla, Universidad del Norte.
Reflection and creation in contemporary art

This collaborative research group, leaded by Carlos Sanabria, took place at Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano.