Karen Paulina Biswell
Karen Paulina Biswell

Karen Paulina Biswell (b. 1983, Aruba) is a Colombian visual artist based in Bogotá and Paris.  

Her practice unfolds at the confluence of ritual, transformation, and visual language, shaped by long-term dialogues with communities whose cosmologies carry ancestral knowledge and embodied resistance. With a background in art history, Biswell engages the symbolic charge of iconography—its persistence across time and its role in shaping collective imaginaries.

In her approach, photography transcends its traditional role as a tool of capture and instead performs as a collective ritual —mutable, permeable, and in constant flux. Travel and ritual become operative forces, generating subtle displacements in perception that traverse the spiritual, the poetic, and the corporeal. The image, rather than being fixed, becomes a site of continuous becoming.

Her recent installation-based works interrogate photography’s claim to surface and stillness, instead proposing a spatial rethinking of the image. Drawing on ancestral visual systems, she opens a field where materiality and temporality collide. Like fermentation, her process is durational—altering substance and perception alike. The viewer becomes part of this alchemical unfolding, implicated in new epistemologies.

Biswell’s transnational trajectory—born to Colombian parents who fled political violence and settled in Paris—resonates through her work’s layered temporalities and shifting geographies. Navigating between Western visual regimes and indigenous ontologies, she constructs a language that resists binary frameworks, instead embracing the resources of the in-between.

Her oeuvre consistently subverts the hierarchical frameworks of the photographic medium, amplifying narratives that are often, sidelined, or rendered invisible. Exploring vulnerability, femininity, and morality, she articulates a poetics of resistance—asserting the image as a space of agency, memory, and transformation.

Her works are held in major institutional collections, including the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac (France), the Museo del Banco de la República (Colombia), the Pérez Art Museum

Karen Paulina Biswell

Represented by
Instituto de visión

88 Eldridge Street, 5th floor
New York, NY, 10002
Tel. +1 (305) 323 3103

www.institutodevision.com

Karen Paulina Biswell

Karen Paulina Biswell (b. 1983, Aruba) is a Colombian visual artist based in Bogotá and Paris.  

Her practice unfolds at the confluence of ritual, transformation, and visual language, shaped by long-term dialogues with communities whose cosmologies carry ancestral knowledge and embodied resistance. With a background in art history, Biswell engages the symbolic charge of iconography—its persistence across time and its role in shaping collective imaginaries.

In her approach, photography transcends its traditional role as a tool of capture and instead performs as a collective ritual —mutable, permeable, and in constant flux. Travel and ritual become operative forces, generating subtle displacements in perception that traverse the spiritual, the poetic, and the corporeal. The image, rather than being fixed, becomes a site of continuous becoming.

Her recent installation-based works interrogate photography’s claim to surface and stillness, instead proposing a spatial rethinking of the image. Drawing on ancestral visual systems, she opens a field where materiality and temporality collide. Like fermentation, her process is durational—altering substance and perception alike. The viewer becomes part of this alchemical unfolding, implicated in new epistemologies.

Biswell’s transnational trajectory—born to Colombian parents who fled political violence and settled in Paris—resonates through her work’s layered temporalities and shifting geographies. Navigating between Western visual regimes and indigenous ontologies, she constructs a language that resists binary frameworks, instead embracing the resources of the in-between.

Her oeuvre consistently subverts the hierarchical frameworks of the photographic medium, amplifying narratives that are often, sidelined, or rendered invisible. Exploring vulnerability, femininity, and morality, she articulates a poetics of resistance—asserting the image as a space of agency, memory, and transformation.

Her works are held in major institutional collections, including the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac (France), the Museo del Banco de la República (Colombia), the Pérez Art Museum

Represented by
Instituto de visión

88 Eldridge Street, 5th floor
New York, NY, 10002
Tel. +1 (305) 323 3103

www.institutodevision.com