ARTIST STATEMENT
Through photography, video, fermentation, ecologies, sound, textiles, and ancestral rituals, I build environments that invite difficult conversations, collective imagining, and radical belonging. My practice interrogates who gets to belong, who is erased, and what it means to return when return isn’t possible. I see the margins not as spaces of lack, but as fertile ground for dreaming, healing, and survival.
At the core of my work is an exploration of spatial inequalities and the challenges that oppressed groups face in constructing place and establishing a sense of belonging. My work is driven by a deep sense of displacement experienced after a 12-year-old civil war forced my family and me to immigrate to the United States. Most of my work stems from a need to find and build community in a way that is both tender, accountable, and challenging—through difficult conversations that make everybody involved actively question their position and privileges in society.
In my practice, I create installations, performances, and participatory spaces that confront the afterlives of colonialism and migration, not from a distance, but through the intimacy of the body, the home, and the land. My work resists the binaries of grief and joy, resistance and care, memory and future, because I believe they often coexist.
The ecologies in my work carry political, historical, and cultural weight. Corn, beans, and coffee have long been central to resistance, survival, and colonization across Latin America. Coffee, a crop tied to exploitative labor and land dispossession, underscores how agriculture has been weaponized against communities and how these violences remain entangled with U.S. imperialism and forced migration.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Lorena Molina is a Salvadoran multidisciplinary artist, educator and curator. She is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art Practice at San Francisco State University. She’s also the founder and the director of Third Space Gallery, a community space and gallery that supports and highlights BIPOC artists. She received her Master of Fine Art degree from the University of Minnesota in 2015 and her Bachelor of Fine Art from California State University, Fullerton, in 2012. Molina has been a recipient of the Diversity of Views Fellowship. Christopher Cardozo Fellowship, (Two) Truth and Reconciliation grant from Artswave, The Idea Fund, ARTPACE International Residency, and The Kala Art Institute fellowship. She has exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally, such as the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, The Kemper Museum, Southeast Museum of Photography, 621 Gallery, The Carnegie, Covington, KY, Vox Populi, FSU Museum of Fine Arts, EXPO Chicago, The Armory, The Rubin Center, SF Camerawork, The Berkeley Art Center, The Beijing Film Academy and all over the piazzas of Florence, Italy.
© Lorena Molina