| FABIOLA CHIMINAZZO | (b.1971, Brazil)

Graduated in 1994 in visual arts at FAAP in São Paulo, Brazil; she holds a Master of Fine Arts and a Post-Graduate Research degree from New York University Abu Dhabi. Her research includes photography, drawing, painting, objects, and installations. Her work was awarded and shown in exhibitions throughout Brazil, including at the University of Campinas, Paço das Artes (USP-SP), and Centre Adamastor (Guarulhos-SP). Chiminazzo's work is in the Museum of Contemporary Arts of Sorocaba's collection. In 2022, she exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Sorocaba, Brazil, at 421 Arts Campus, Abu Dhabi, UAE, and won the Art Circle Award 2022, UAE. In 2023, she exhibited at 421, Abu Dhabi, and was granted a Post-Graduate Research Fellowship at NYUAD, UAE. Since 2017, she has been living between Brazil and the United Arab Emirates.

| ABOUT MY WORK |

I love a good rabbit hole. Seeing "this" and suddenly seeing "that" is the game I am fascinated by. My practice lives in those spaces of transformations, double meanings, and fragments reappearing as something new.

As an artist, I move like a detective or even an archaeologist: tracing patterns, excavating meanings, collecting clues from world history, the arts, and daily life. I gather materials—images, texts, and objects to unravel assumptions built around narratives, artifacts, and institutions. Through collage, drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography, I reconfigure stories, always searching for the empirical spaces where intuition meets inquiry.

My work becomes a method of questioning time and memory—how do we hold the past, and how does it hold us?

In my practice, the copy becomes sacred. The trace becomes the origin. What is revealed in the fragment? What if archives were emotional, not just informational? I remix myths, histories, and artistic genealogies—turning personal and collective memory into visual language.

My collages resemble paintings with texture and depth; my paintings carry the trace of drawing and photographic memory—incised, scratched, layered. Visual representation is present but never fixed. It opens into the symbolic, the imaginative. I borrow from —not to reproduce, but to enter into conversation across time.

I begin with the image but work toward what lies beneath it: emotion, memory, aura. Along the way, I question structures of knowledge—how museums shape perception, how archives erase, and how images manipulate memory. I borrow from art history, anthropology, consciousness, and neuroscience to explore how we inherit stories and how we might reshape them.

 I am drawn to archives, museums, documents, and ruins—structures created to preserve and define. I approach them with a desire to unsettle—not to destroy but to dislocate, to open them up to multiplicity and play, to surface what has been lost—or what longs to be remembered.

I recode their logic and question the inventory of reality—both physical and mental—that culture has inherited and internalized. I am interested in how systems such as art history, science, and mythology shape what we perceive as knowledge and in how we might reassemble them to make space for new ways of seeing and knowing.

Because seeing “takes time”, I practice slow looking. I work with materials like beeswax, linen, and oil paint, engaging with their memory and resonance. I look for the metaphysical in the mundane and the sacred, in what’s been deemed obsolete. The sacred, for me, is an ontological thirst—our need to find meaning through form, matter, and memory. Sometimes I think of my works as replicas, as echoes of archetypes—original forms carrying spiritual resonance. Other times, I enjoy the irony of a humble cutout or waxy copy suddenly feeling like a museum artifact. Who decides what’s an “original” anyway? I appropriate not to claim, but to reframe. It’s not theft, it’s conversation. And sometimes, it’s a little mischievous.

My influences include Aby Warburg, Georges Didi-Huberman, Tarsila do Amaral, Louise Bourgeois, Hilma af Klint, Francis Alÿs, and others who probe consciousness, history, and the poetics of image-making. My artistic roots took hold in Brazil, amid political transformation and protest, and continue to evolve across cultural landscapes like the UAE, where new artistic ecologies emerge.

I often feel like both a collector and a forger, an image-thief and a caretaker. I don’t want to summarize the world—I want to disturb its arrangements, to offer room for feeling, failure, and possibility.  Disruption as a method. Reverence as a method. And if that means joy—joy in cutting, in assembling, in rediscovering—then yes, as Oswald de Andrade wrote, "Joy is the proof of the pudding."

At the core of my practice are questions:

• What happens when an image loses its origin and its label? Can it become more real?
  How can we make space for memory that does not rely on authority or chronology?

• Can intimacy be a form of resistance?
  Can we reimagine institutions not by denying their histories, but by disrupting their logic and letting new forms emerge from the cracks?