Yohanna M Roa.
solo Exhibition
Universidad Javeriana, Cali - Colombia
Textile Woman. Yohanna M. Roa
By Karen Cordero Reiman, curator
2022
The exhibition Textile Woman by Yohanna M. Roa synthesizes and at the same time expands the
transdisciplinary artistic practice of this Colombian-American creator through an immersive
installation that she activates through performance. It incorporates individual pieces made at
different times during her career, as well as new works. The exhibition has an autobiographical
basis, since the use of sewing, embroidery, and crochet in Roa's artwork refers to her upbringing
in a family where her grandfather was a tailor and her grandmother a seamstress and clothing
designer. At the same time, Roa's work uses the intervention and transformation of canonical
images from the history of art with textile media, in order to criticize the patriarchal and colonial
structures that establish hierarchies of the gaze and of material culture that they impose on our
bodies and identities. In this way, Roa recuperates and revalues—in her own words-- "the ability
of many women to construct environments and transform public interactions from a private
standpoint”, through works and actions that transgress the imaginary borders that our cultures
and our consciences establish between historical moments, geographical spaces, gender
identities, and definitions of art. In this way, she creates a context characterized by freedom and
discovery, that is both a personal manifesto and a proposal for the restructuring of power
relations that are imposed on a social level.
Photos: Antono Juárez C.