Tania Candiani never planned on being an artist. Growing up in Mexico City, she dreamed of working as a writer and that is what led her to leave home, at 20, and move to Tijuana. A cousin, who ran a magazine there, offered her a job.
Among her first assignments: writing a story about a group of artists who were finishing a large, public mural. She got caught up in the moment.
“They were like, ‘well, you are here, why don’t you help us,’” she said. Candiani picked up a paintbrush and joined the crew.
“And then they invited me to do something else with them,” the artist said, explaining how her career in journalism came to a quick close. Scores of art projects followed, solo work and collaborations with local painters, musicians, writers, dancers, weavers and, perhaps most influentially, filmmakers.
That was all the art school Candiani ever had and, she said, all that she ever needed, and it led to the unusually varied career she has today, which brings all those disciplines together into multimedia projects that rely heavily on collaboration with other artists. She is known primarily for her videos, but she makes sound installations, sculpture, textiles and performative works.
At 50, she is in demand internationally. In the past year, there have been exhibitions of her work in New York, Houston, Madrid, Toronto and São Paulo, Brazil.
This month, she has concurrent shows in Mexico City and in Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia, and beginning on Thursday, she will debut a series of works at Frieze New York, via her Colombia-based gallery and fair exhibitor, Instituto de Visión.
It will not stop there. She is in the thick of work on projects for an expo in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and a group show opening soon in Ogden, Utah. Earlier this month, she traveled to Southern California to put together a proposal for next year’s Desert X, an art biennial that features large, site-specific works in outdoor settings, including the Coachella Valley.
What ties it all together? Deep research into each topic she takes on, she said, and a commitment to letting her learning shape the final product. The Utah piece, for example, will be a multimedia exploration into the history of trains in the United States. For the show now on view in Medellín, she made a video, but also designed a giant harp in the shape of a river she was researching; she will invite local musicians to play during the show.
“I’m a storyteller,” she said. “It does not matter what kind of media I’m using.”
Candiani lives in Mexico City and maintains a studio in a former warehouse, located along a set of railroad tracks in the Miguel Hidalgo neighborhood. It is a vast, clean space with high ceilings and plenty of room for her staff of three, who help with tasks including scheduling, video editing and maquette making. But the place is nearly empty, with just a few tables and computer monitors set up in the main room.
Her real work, she said, is commission based and happens on location. She goes to unfamiliar places, often at the invitation of museums or artist residencies, and finds stories that are relevant to the region. She then weaves them into what she describes as “poetic documentaries.” For each she tries to come up with a unique method of telling the tale, often at the intersection of art, science and technology, and usually with a dose of environmental, labor or feminist politics edited in.
A good example is “For the Animals,” a video commissioned by Arizona State University Art Museum in 2020. Candiani researched the animals that live in the southwestern United States and Northern Mexico and how sound influences their behavior. Recognizing that each species has a unique ability to hear higher or lower frequencies than humans, she collaborated with electronic musicians to create musical scores that could be calming to wolves, coyotes, jaguars and other desert creatures.
The idea was incorporated into a 10-minute video displayed across three screens, which also explains how sound waves work in the ear. Candiani explained in her artist’s statement that she also intended the work to “bring awareness to the plight of these animals should a border wall be built to prevent their ancient migration patterns in their native region.”
For her project in São Paulo last year, in which she highlighted the women’s rights movement in Brazil, her language was sewing and embroidery. She made a quilt, 50 feet tall and 30 feet wide, decorated with text spelling out slogans from recent streets protests, and used it to cover the facade of Vermelho Gallery.
To construct the piece, she worked with a cooperative of immigrant women known for their ancestral knowledge of textile techniques and their struggle for worker rights. It was her way of documenting the struggle for gender equality while also bringing attention to the treatment of foreign laborers.
“She’s tapping into a lot of issues that are very much a part of the zeitgeist when you look at our global environment,” said Jan Fjeld, who runs the gallery. “She deals with things that are being forgotten.”
Or as Candiani puts it, she accepts the “invitation to listen closely” to the stories that each place and its people tell about their own histories, then creates works that emphasize the parts that “get no attention because they are tiny.”
Her pieces, she said, are translations. She hears things and then interprets them into whatever language fits the moment. For a piece in Ireland, she wanted to explain how the tides in local rivers impact the patterns of social behavior and the way locals interact with their environment, so she created a synchronized swimming routine for a group of women who meet daily to exercise at high tide. The result is the video, “Tidal Choreography,” which captures the aquatic routine above and below the water’s surface as music plays. “Patterns are created, gravity shifts and ecological worlds revealed,” she wrote in her artist’s statement of the piece.
In that way, she delivers frank messages about social issues wrapped in graceful creative expression, using music, textiles and movement. Topical politics are a driver of the work, but so is natural beauty and, frequently, joy.
The works that Instituto de Visión will show at Frieze are part of a series that Candiani has been making about dance. She recently came across “Las Danzas Folklóricas de México,” a 1976 book by a researcher named Zacarías Segura Salinas, documenting traditional choreography practiced across Mexico. He created his own system of symbols and lines that come together into diagrams that capture specific foot movements.
For Candiani, the diagrams appeared as a code, a separate language of sorts for those who might want to recreate the dances. She learned to decipher it and adapted it into works of art, recreating the marks using yellow and silver thread sewn into panels of black fabric mounted on sewing rings. Employing that particular media brings two Mexican traditions together, dance and embroidery, and elevates the popular arts into the stuff of museums and international art fairs.
“To Tania, that is very important,” said Beatriz López, one of the three female directors who together run Instituto de Visión. “To show all of this work, this economy that is very strong, very important, and historically related to women, but has been invisible.”