Jimena Sarno
Jimena Sarno
VISUAL ARTS
Argentina
Summer 2025
Contact Info
Instagram: _la_jime_
Website: jimenasarno.com
BIOGRAPHY
Jimena Sarno is an interdisciplinary artist and educator born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and living in Los Angeles. With a focus on the sensorial and affective experiences shaped by political subjecthood, she works across a range of media including installation, sound, video, text and sculpture. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at MASS MoCA, REDCAT, Vincent Price Art Museum, Clockshop, 18th Street Arts Center, LACE, Visitor Welcome Center, The Museum of Latin American Art, The Mistake Room, Human Resources, PØST, UCI Contemporary Art Center, Grand Central Art Center, Control Room, San Diego Art Institute, The Luminary, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea de Santiago De Compostela, Fellows of Contemporary Art, Calico Gallery and Small Editions, among others. Sarno is a recipient of the 2021 California Arts Council Individual Fellowship, the 2015 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, the 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, and the 2019 Rema Hort Mann ACE Grant, and is a 2019-2024 Lucas Artist Fellow in Visual Arts at Montalvo Arts Center.
PROJECT
During her residency at Nawat Fes, Jimena Sarno will research traditional Moroccan weaving and the loom as a space for imagination and improvisation, documenting the process in an experimental film for her upcoming solo exhibition. The project is centered on objects crafted for use in a hoped-for utopian future built on collectivity, reconfiguration, and repair—an alternative to systems of coloniality and narratives of Modernism that reinforce ideas of progress vs. primitivity. The multimedia installation encompasses film, sound and sculptural components using techniques including weaving, felting, woodworking, metalwork and pottery. These objects are associated with folk and craft traditions—ways of making and bodies of knowledge often passed from maker to maker. The focus is on the potential futures that can be imagined through ancient traditions, in which objects such as textiles are bearers of information and stories as well as being usable objects. Many works in this installation are the results of collaboration with other makers, for which she hopes to build relationships with local weavers. These collaborations underscore the collectivity that she believes must characterize the utopia that hovers at the horizon, charged with the potential to critique and even change the present.