Jennifer Allora is an artist who co-founded Allora & Calzadilla with Guillermo Calzadilla, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Collaborating since 1995, Allora & Calzadilla has produced an expansive and interdisciplinary body of work, combining performance, sculpture, video, and sound. Their work subtly reframes or magnifies political tensions and strategies of governance and militarization and emerges from the strategic collision of objects, gestures, marks and contexts, all informed by a keen sense of research. Their unexpected juxtapositions reflect everything from history to contemporary geo-political realities, exposing, de-stabilizing, and re-ordering complicated dynamics in poetic ways. The results of these formal and conceptual experiments elucidate the artists’ ongoing exploration of how metaphor can reflect, reshape, and ultimately transform how the world appears to us and how we respond to it. The duo has exhibited widely and in 2011 represented the USA in the Venice Biennale, marking the first time artists living in Puerto Rico represented the United States. Jennifer Allora received a Master of Science from the MIT Visual Arts Program in 2003 and was a fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.
