Yani aviles is a transdisciplinary conceptual artist whose practice is a form of medicine making. They create project-based, contemplative installations and participatory works that engage in research-poetics, sharing holistic forms of knowledge production to generate individual and social transformation.

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Projects & Exhibitions

HOW DO YOU THROW A BRICK THROUGH THE WINDOW...

Group exhibition with Chloe P. Crawford, Nat Decker, Jeff Kasper, Carly Mandel, Jeffrey Meris, and Libby Paloma at Tufts University examining the radical questioning of Johanna Hedva’s seminal text, “Sick Woman Theory,” asking: “How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?” Featuring a multimedia installation consisting of two works: a site-specific video installation, If the earth is flesh, everything remains, and a collapsible sculpture, open Source (bench), the works explore connections between land and body conditions, and ways to intervene, critique, adapt, and transform current structures into responsive sites for reflection, healing, and support.

OPEN SOURCE

An installation that serves as an adaptive model interrogating the theories and works of Carl Andre and Donald Judd, the architecture of NYC public housing, book bans, and censorship. Transforming into relational objects of support (a communal table, desk, benches, and stools) and learning (curated books and media) for various communities, the work expands cultural ideologies to create a new integrative site as a citation. Through a collection of resources and via collapsible sculptures, it functions as a living archive/record and as a mobile institution.

THE DOOR YOU OPEN IS DETERMINED BY HOW YOU TWIST THE KNOB. THE ROOM YOU ENTER IS DETERMINED BY HOW YOU OPEN THE DOOR.

Three-person exhibition with Mira Dayal and Micah Schippa, consisting of discrete conceptual, participatory, and sound works. “The exhibition comes together in resonance... The works ensembled are shaped into a series of sentences without words, a congregation of signs yearning to speak.” —Apparatus Projects.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ~~2022~~

A multimedia installation, performance, and participatory practice that uses the story of a young “wayward” Indigenous girl’s attempt to escape an institution (speciﬁcally a convent) as a branching off point to engage similar narratives in the present, bringing awareness to the contemporary epidemic of missing and murdered BIPOC women, girls, trans, 2S, and GNC folks, as well as various forms of intersectional oppression and systemic violence.

BLOSSOM SOUP, BLOSSOM SALAD

Catalog produced for the group exhibition blossom soup, blossom salad at the Block Museum. The book features commissioned texts by artists and critics, in addition to the research and writings of an emard, Whitney Johnson, Scott Kemp, Travis Morehead, jess mai walker, and myself.

YOUR POISON IS OUR MEDICINE

Multimedia installation featuring a text-based work that unfolds through sound, small wall sculptures, and a takeaway diagram. The work engages with and challenges the educational methods, didactics, and displays of natural history museums, reframing our relationship to poisonous plants (such as those from the Anacardiaceae family: pistachio and poison ivy) and pressing environmental issues (including overconsumption, water scarcity, and climate crisis), inspiring actions for transformative change.

ARROW

A multisensory installation and participatory work that explores migration, ecological devastation, intergenerational and historical trauma from an anti-colonial perspective. It uses the Anishinaabeg Seven Fires Prophecy, the Statue of Liberty (New York), and the Birth of the New World (Puerto Rico) monuments as metaphors, weaving together charged materials like gunpowder and archival images with ritual candle-making sessions and an audio essay/sound installation to prompt reflection on individual and collective responsibility.

SURFACE TENSION

Group exhibition with Ashley Gillanders, Rosemary Holliday Hall, SaraNoa Mark, and Galen-Odell Smedley, consisting of conceptual, sound, and ritual candle-making works. “Surface Tension is an invitation to experience an archive of internal landscapes at a time when access to our external world is in refrain... to embrace a future that can transcend our bodily relation to the world around us.” —Pia Singh for Heaven Gallery.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ~~2019~~

Acknowledgments 2019 was the first installation featuring conceptual, video, and sculpture works that engage research into the story of a young “wayward” Indigenous girl’s attempt to escape an institution (1892 NYT article “She Tired of Convent Life”). This initial iteration seeks to address the violence of borders and notions of private property, connecting stories of capture and cultural erasure through poetry, iconoclastic gestures, and by orienting the body to scent, patterns, and time.

SOURCE OF ORIGIN

Two-person exhibition with Wyne Veen at LVL3 consisting of a floor installation and discrete works that explore shifts in perspective and meaning related to context. Using personalized methods and unique approaches—such as allegory, changes in scale, and gesture—the works reevaluate platforms for processing and distilling information.

A WAVE IS WATER

Solo exhibition at New Capital Projects rooted in Thích Nhất Hạnh’s No Death, No Fear. The exhibition included a multisensory installation, a performance, and a group ritual responding to grief, loss, notions of identity, and the concept of impermanence.

BEING FREE TOGETHER

Being free together ruminates on the state of polarization across the US and on a lecture by Ram Dass that shares the same name. The multisensory installation includes conceptual, sculptural, and ritual performance works that translate feelings and teachings into transmutation and symbolic resonance.

FINDING STABILITY AMIDST GLOBAL POLITICAL TURMOIL

A performance and participatory work aimed at confronting and healing oppressed parts of the self through intimacy and reconnection to flora—offering a rose remedy, a recipe, and space for complex conversations and emotions to be held.