Labor without a monument
Curated by Natacha Voliakovsky, Argentina Performance Art
BRAC, New York

December 10, 2026 - January 24, 2027

Artists:
Cassandra Mayela (Venezuela)
Lucía Reissig (Argentinian-Guatemalan)
Carolina Muñoz Awad (Chile)
Yali Romagoza (Cuba)

Curatorial text:
Labor without a monument
This exhibition brings together four Latin American artists who live and work in New York: Cassandra Mayela (Venezuela), Lucía Reissig (Argentinian-Guatemalan), Carolina Muñoz Awad (Chile), and Yali Romagoza (Cuba). Each approaches the performative as a sign rather than an event. Their works are sculptural and yet they obey the logic of the body: they occupy space, sustain a gesture, wait. In performance, the work leaves when the body leaves, sometimes leaving something behind, sometimes leaving nothing. Here it happens the other way around (or almost). An object remains that holds the trace of an action, a presence that insists and keeps speaking when no one is speaking to it anymore. Each piece is a body that stayed, and in staying it opens conversations no one had foreseen.
Mayela treats belongings as living archives and invites others to make with her. Reissig molds and repeats, where memory is kept in the domestic. Muñoz Awad invents situations of slow gestures and physical limits in which the body is caught between the architectural and the social. Romagoza takes the techniques of garment-making and turns them into fiber forms that the body activates, tracing migration and the silent ways of surviving. There is one matter that runs through them: invisible labor. Washing, mending, feeding, tidying, sewing, caring for, sustaining others. Minimal, repeated tasks that all of us, to a greater or lesser extent, do; almost always unpaid, almost never recognized, rarely understood as a form of knowledge. They have fallen to women, and to migrant women even more. Because they leave no monument, they vanish as soon as they are done.
And yet there is something else here. A marginal imagination, disciplined and positive out of sheer need to survive, that learned to make a world with whatever was at hand. A thread runs through these works: reweaving the community fabric, restoring the political nature of the domestic, remembering that what happens in the kitchen, in the workshop, at the sewing table, was never entirely private. Women are the ones who mark the way, though rarely does anyone ask them which way. This exhibition seeks to give permanence to that gesture.
Between the labor that is seen and the labor that is not, these works are bodies in absence that can no longer be ignored.

Curated by Natacha Voliakovsky, Argentina Performance Art
 

Cassandra Mayela (Venezuela) 

Venezuelan interdisciplinary artist based in New York. Her practice spans mixed media, textiles, installation, and socially engaged projects, examining memory, belonging, active meditation, and labor as tools for self-healing. Her work treats personal belongings as living archives, inviting alternative social networks to participate in the making and meaning of each piece, and activates art as a relational process rather than a fixed object. She is an alumna of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2025) and has attended residencies including Bolster Arts and Pocoapoco. She has presented solo exhibitions at Instituto Cervantes and LES Girls Club, and her work has been shown at MOCAD, UNAM, and Eric Firestone Gallery. She will participate in Malvestir at MoMA PS1 (Spring 2027).

Lucía Reissig (Argentinian-Guatemalan)
Argentinian-Guatemalan sculptor based in New York whose work examines how bodies and objects become repositories of memory through care, domestic labor, informal economies, and food politics. Informed by feminist theory and abstraction, she works in resin, fiberglass, paper, and cast metal, using casting and repetition as both method and metaphor, often returning to containers and vessels as carriers of memory. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Bard College (2024). Her solo exhibitions include Glossary (mimo, New York, 2025) and 287.5 kilos (Móvil, Buenos Aires, 2023), and her work has been shown at Smack Mellon, Centro Cultural Recoleta, and MALBA. She has received the Kenneth Kemble Young Artist Award and the inaugural Silver Foundation Grant for Sculpture, and is a 2026 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow.

Carolina Muñoz Awad (Chile)
Chilean multidisciplinary artist and architect based in Brooklyn, whose practice spans performance, sculpture, installation, and research. Drawing on her background in architecture, biology, and embodied research, she explores the body as a site of memory, resistance, care, and transformation. Working with fabric, sand, rice, concrete, ceramics, and wearable structures, she uses slow gestures, repetition, physical constraint, and absurdity to examine the relationship between vulnerability and agency, placing the body between the architectural, the organic, and the social. Her work has been presented in Santiago, Brooklyn, Asunción, and in New York and Massachusetts at Grace Exhibition Space and TurnPark Art Space. Since 2022, she has been a Teaching Artist at the Brooklyn Museum, developing programs for families and communities.

Yali Romagoza (Cuba)
Cuban interdisciplinary artist based in New York. Her practice spans performance, textile sculpture, video, and installation. Drawing on her background in fashion design, she transforms textile techniques into sculptural forms that explore migration, embodiment, memory, and the architectures of survival. Her work has been presented at the North Carolina Museum of Art, The Immigrant Artist Biennial, Art in Odd Places, and Abrons Arts Center, and she has received the Franklin Furnace Fund, the Queens Arts Fund, and the EmergeNYC residency. In 2022, Ediciones Rialta published her book Cuquita La Muñeca Cubana. She holds a BA in Art History from the University of Havana and an MFA in Fashion Design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Natacha Voliakovsky
Founder & Director of Argentina Performance Art
Curator specializing in Performance and Social Justice Art
Natacha Voliakovsky is an Argentina-born performance and social-justice artist based in New York, and the founder and director of Argentina Performance Art (APA), the first theoretical research platform dedicated to the study of performance art in the Global South.
A curator specializing in performance art and hybrid projects, she has organized public and private programs in New York and Argentina, most of them focused on social-justice art. Her recent projects include a visual and performative exhibition at NYLAAT (New York Latin American Triennial), a South American performance art cycle at Teatro Latea at The Clemente Soto Vélez, a series of performance events at Grace Exhibition Space in New York, and an upcoming group exhibition at BRAC in New York (December 2026 to January 2027). Her interdisciplinary approach continues to enrich the performance art landscape, making her a strong fit for challenging exhibitions that bring live art together with urgent social issues.

Argentina Performance Art (APA) is a cultural project dedicated exclusively to the archiving, theoretical research, and dissemination of Argentine and Latin American performance art. Established in 2018 as the first free and inclusive digital archive of Argentine performance art, it offers constantly updated content on artists and performative works. As an educational resource, the platform provides academic, journalistic, and audiovisual materials for consultation. Over time, APA has expanded its scope to include initiatives that promote knowledge of Latin American performance art, such as cycles of conferences, talks, exhibitions, and live performances, in Argentina and internationally. Its main objective is to contribute to the preservation of cultural heritage through performance art. By providing a theoretical framework for its definition and understanding, APA aims to value and legitimize this ephemeral medium within the historical development of contemporary art.
www.argentinaperformanceart.com