EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Karina Skvirsky
Karina Aguilera Skvirsky is a multidisciplinary artist. In 2019, she received a Creative Capital grant to produce Sacred Geometry, a series of hand-cut photographic collages, and How to Build a Wall and Other Ruins, a project that includes a multi-channel video installation and live performances.
Recent exhibitions include her participation in Bienalsur in the Palazzo Borghese, 2025 [Rome, IT]; La Avanzada Acestralista at El Museo de Arqueología y Arte Contemporáneo, 2025 [Guayaquil, EC]; Hors Pistes at Centre Pompidou, 2024 [Málaga, SP]; Jugar con los ojos cerrados: Cien Años de Surrealismo at RGR Gallery, 2024 [Mexico City, MX]; and Re-Collections at the LatinX Project, 2024 [New York, NY]. Upcoming exhibitions include; The Afterlife at Capilla Azul, 2026 [Chiloé, CH]; and Disposessions in the Americas at Wrightwood 659, 2026 [Chicago, IL].
How to Build a Wall and Other Ruins premiered at the XV Cuenca Biennial, curated by Blanca de la Torre in December 2021 [Cuenca, EC]. Other significant international exhibitions include Impermanence, the XIII Cuenca Biennial, curated by Dan Cameron in 2016, and There Is Always a Cup of Sea for Man to Sail, the 29th São Paulo Biennial [São Paulo, BR].
She has received grants from: New York State Council on the Arts, Film and Electronic Arts, 2023; Rema Hort Mann Foundation, 2023; Anonymous Was A Woman, 2019; Creative Capital, 2019; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Creative Engagement, 2019; New York Foundation for the Arts, 2019; National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures (NALAC), 2018; Fulbright Scholar Program, 2015; Jerome Foundation, 2015 and others.
Artist Statement
My practice engages complex histories through critical inquiry and process-based research. I integrate the act of uncovering history into the artworks themselves. For example, in How to Build a Wall and Other Ruins, a multi-media installation, I investigated the myths, histories, and conspiracy theories surrounding Ingapirca, an ancient archeological site in Ecuador. Built by the Inka with Cañari labor, the site embodies the convergence of distinct architectural traditions. The elliptical structure— one of the few known examples of Inka architecture in this shape—demonstrates clear Cañari influence. Yet today, the specifics surrounding Ingapirca’s construction is often
diminished by pseudo-archaeologists that attribute its creation to extraterrestrials. These speculative theories function as a contemporary form of colonial erasure.
My personal history informs this work. I grew up moving between Guayaquil, Ecuador, and Washington, DC, experiences that shaped a hybrid perspective and continue to ground my artistic research. Regular visits to Ecuador, my mother’s homeland, have deepened my engagement with indigenous and colonial histories. My practice embraces a cross-disciplinary approach, integrating diverse media that privilege abstraction, tactility, and material experimentation.
My projects are grounded in rigorous, research-based methodologies, that include archival research into historical records and material culture, oral histories that are conducted through interviews with diverse participants and critical fabulation, a creative strategy to imagine the silences and absences within dominant historical narratives.
This methodology ensures the work is both historically informed and conceptually expansive, bridging research with artistic innovation.
