BIO

• Oct - Dec 2025 @Shedhalle Zurich : group exhibition "Loving Shedhalle" , curated by Luci Tuma, Carla Peca and Michael Hiltbrunner

• May 2025 @Wildbuchs Festival, Basel 

• Sept-Nov 2024 @ARKO Seoul : group exhibition "Into the Rhythm: From Score to Contact Zone" . Curated by ARKO Team and On Curating

* Oct 2021–Jan 2022 @Aargauer Kunsthaus : part of "An Unhappy Archive Part II", curated by Sabian Baumann and Karin Michalski

• Oct 2021 @Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Tamaulipas : part of the educational program of the all womxn exhibition "Reseña" in Matamoros, Mexico. Curated by Javier Dragustinovis

• April - May 2021 @DISTRICT Berlin : group exhibition "Picking out images from my soul's eye" curated by Verena Melgarejo-Weinandt and Andrea Keppler.

• Nov  2019 @ Les Complices* Zürich : Solo Exhibition "Letters from Onion Island"  Curated by Gökçe Ergör.​

​Guided by the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, self-described as “chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer, and cultural theorist”(1), visual artist Paloma Ayala in collaboration with musician Luna León, reframes Anzaldúa’s poetry in a format that invites to sing along, read together, listen and participate.

This ‘queerified’, ‘mexified’ version of Anzaldúa´s texts, recognizes the importance of re-living her voice. It acknowledges her presence in the contemporary problematics of the MX/US border, seen from the perspective of Mexican women, feminists, whose roots and family still live in those spaces.

During the Karaoke Readings lecture performance, Paloma reads both from Borderlands/La Frontera and from the fanzine LETTERS FROM ONION ISLAND, which fictionalizes a letter exchange between Paloma and Gloria, who becomes a guide and a lover. 


Karaoke Readings is part of a larger artistic project that explores ways to narrate the space of the delta of the Río Bravo/Río Grande, the MX/US border river, and to develop solidaire relationships with rurality, water bodies, and biota.

In her project, Paloma questions: How could Anzaldúa´s, and other poetic, female, and cultural agencies lead to create platforms of knowledge creation in favor of the ecologies of the river delta? How could a practice of decolonization of the dominating narrative of violence of the border, create new accesses to the Río Bravo/Río Grande river, both physically and in the collective or personal imaginaries?

(1)https://womensmuseum.wordpress.com/2018/02/14/embracing-the-border-gloria-anzalduas-borderlands-la-frontera/ 

Available online!!!

KARAOKE READINGS​

 “Through the practice of karaoke and the emobodiment that comes with it, Paloma lets the viewer (re)access the different narratives of the delta and even adding a new layer on top. Even though the viewer maybe does understand every word of the songs, this performed embodiment allows another way of translation and more implicit knowledge-transfer.” - Gökçe Ergör

KARAOKE READINGS​