ABOUT

Roberto Sifuentes is an interdisciplinary performance artist.  His work fuses highly charged cultural issues with a wild pop culture aesthetic. From homeland security to extreme reality television – from video games to military training – from fetishism to evangelism – Sifuentes creates interactive performance installations where personas wind their way through psycho/sexual/political/ universes. The result is a cinematic style that uses satire, humor, and spectacle to peel away the viewer’s protective layers and reveal society’s desires, fears and obsessions. 

 

Sifuentes’ recent projects include: #exsanguination, a collaboration with new media artist jonCates and Aram Han Sifuentes (present); “Reculmulations: Digital Avatars and Performance objects” A collaboration with digital artist Claudia Hart and composer Edmund Campion (Black and White Gallery NYC). 

 

A founding member of La Pocha Nostra performance troupe (San Francisco), Sifuentes has collaborated and performed with Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra throughout at over 800 venues throughout the United States, Europe and Latin America. Projects with La Pocha Include: “Corpo Illicito” (2009-2011), “The New Barbarians Collection Fall ’07 X-teme Fashion show and Human Auction”  (Arnolfini, 2007), “Divino Corpo” (NRLA, 2008) “The Mapa/Corpo Series: Interactive rituals for the new millennium” (2005-2009), The Mexterminator Project (1997-2001), BORDERscape 2000 (1998-99), The Temple of Confessions (an interactive performance/installation which opened at the Corcoran Gallery in October 1996), El Naftazteca: Cyber-Aztec TV for 2000 AD, and The Dangerous Border Game.  

 

Sifuentes has co-authored two books: Exercises for Rebel Artists: Radical Performance Pedagogy (Routledge 2011), and Temple of  Confessions: Mexican Beasts and Living Santos (Powerhouse Books 1997). 

 

Sifuentes is a Collected Artist of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.  

 

From 2001-2006, Sifuentes was in residence at LaMaMa ETC in New York as Artistic Director of The Trinity College/La MaMa Performing Arts Program NYC.  He was the 2008 Elena Diaz-Verson Amos Eminent Scholar in Latin American Studies at Columbus State University, Georgia. 

 

Sifuentes is currently a tenured full Professor of Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.