alchemizing states of crisis into moments for healing.
Yani aviles (b. Canarsie and Munsee Lenape land | Brooklyn, NY) researches and writes through the lenses of the personal, historical, ecological, and contemporary. Oriented towards the relational, they create project-based, contemplative installations and conceptual works that center self and communal attunement and restoration through reckoning. Utilizing multimedia and multisensory practices, they present embodied decolonial approaches to knowledge production and dissemination, aiming to heal the Cartesian split, bridging mind to body. Tending is an ongoing process.
Born into a working poor/working class Borikua | Puerto Rican family of Indigenous (Taíno), African, and Iberian descent, they learned how to listen to dreams and work in collaboration with the natural world. Being both mixed and first-generation, their practice is concerned with exploring and confronting issues of being and belonging and seeks to integrate complex traumas of oppressed subjectivities. They work across text, sculpture, sound, installation, performance, and propositions, engaging scholarship, spiritual epistemologies, ritual methodologies, plant and energy medicine, poetry, and storytelling to disrupt the hierarchy of the senses and offer reflexive strategies and possibilities for liberation.
Yani has exhibited both nationally and internationally at venues including Parent Company (New York, NY), Apparatus Projects (Chicago, IL), and The Institut für Alles Mögliche (Berlin, DE), among others. They earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University, along with certifications in Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy, Herbalism, and Energy Healing. Yani has taught, lectured, and participated in panels at Tufts University, Michigan State University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Northwestern University, and EXPO Chicago.