Thais Muniz

 Image: Darling, Don’t Turn Your Back On Me Multidisciplinary piece presented through text, video-performance and gallery installation RHA Gallery, Dublin, 2021

I am a Brazilian-Irish visual artist and researcher working across multiple mediums to explore the intersections between inherited and acquired identities, memory, transit, and inward love. My work is community-oriented and unfolds intimate communal learning processes through workshops, performances, installations, sculptures, and film. It also spans photography, celebrations, and activations using archives, personal memorabilia, and symbology. 

My practice engages with the reimagination of realities through mechanisms of refusal, dreaming, and personal magic. I examine representations of ‘otherness’ through notions of blackness and displacement in a postcolonial context. My research tools draw from the theories and critiques of Black feminist thinkers, historical episodes, and embodied and experiential art-making processes through collective participation.

A crucial aspect of my work involves activating spaces through my presence and engaging with the geopolitics and geographies of these territories. I challenge and seek to expand canonical systems of representation. I am committed to creating spaces that highlight these concepts, using accessible mediums and languages to build connections and start conversations that encourage personal and collective healing from current and transgenerational traumas.

Since 2022, my ongoing research, New Atlantic Triangulations, explores displacement and mental health through embodied mythologies and cosmovisions shaped by my mixed identity as a Brazilian woman of African heritage with Irish citizenship. The imminent displacement I experience as a Black Brazilian invokes the sentiment of belonging to distance, navigating spiralling paths that transform the impossible into possibility. Moving beyond capitalism’s false narratives of choice, I link these territories through shared philosophies, proposing ways to create disruptive, political and poetical practices. My work employs Indigenous technologies to foster mental health awareness and address environmental impacts within the context of degrowth and social justice, serving as a catalyst in my artistic process.

Participated in the following Live Art Ireland projects :

> Artist In Residence the Care Share Express Residency : See more

 Image: Darling, Don’t Turn Your Back On Me Multidisciplinary piece presented through text, video-performance and gallery installation RHA Gallery, Dublin, 2021