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Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra

Positions held:
  • Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art, School of Historical Studies
Address

Room 123, 39-47 Gordon Square

Email
  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    I am an art historian and cultural theorist with expertise in Latin American Art, performance, feminism, and art and technoscience. I joined the History of Art Department at Birkbeck in 2018, as part of the department’s interest in expanding its global focus. Previously, I held a Junior Research Fellowship at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and taught at the departments of History of Art, Spanish, and the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge. I completed my PhD, entitled “Touched Bodies: Corporeal Ethics in Latin American Art at the Onset of the Media Age” in the same institution.

    I have extensive curatorial experience and serve as director of Peltz Gallery since September 2024. I also run the film production company Tecolote Films and have worked as director, scriptwriter and editor for documentary films. My film Malintzin 17 premiered at the Tiger Competition of International Film Festival Rotterdam and received the Best Documentary Award at the Morelia Film Festival. 

    Highlights

    • Touched Bodies: The Performative Turn in Latin American Art (Rutgers University Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the 2020 Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Art of the Present (ASAP).

    • Out in January 2024: Marcos Kurtycz: Corporeality Unbound (Jumex-Fauna: Mexico City).

    • Out in September 2023: The New Public Art https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477327623/the-new-public-art/ Available for pre-order. Discount code: UTXM25

    • Leverhulme Research Fellow for the project "The New Life: A Cultural History of Cybernetics in Latin America" (2020-2024).

    • Art Journal 2018 Award for ‘Beyond Evil: Politics, Ethics, and Religion in Leon Ferrari’s Illustrated Nunca Más’.

    Qualifications

    • BA, El Colegio de Mexico & Harvard University
    • MPhil in History, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris
    • PhD, Latin American Cultural Studies, University of Cambridge

    Web profiles

    Professional activities

    Member of the editorial board of the Oxford Art Journal.


    Professional memberships

    • Association for Art History (AAH)

      Association for the Study of the Art of the Present (ASAP)

      International Council of Museums (ICOM), UK


    Honours and awards

    ORCID

    0000-0002-1484-6790
  • Research

    Research

    Research interests

    • Art and politics in Latin America, public art, the politics of aesthetics
    • Performance art, dance, video art, experimental film, and artists’ books
    • Feminist, ecological, post/decolonial and post/more-than-human art and theory
    • Mexican Intellectual History
    • The cultural history and visual culture of art-science projects in twentieth-century Latin America (specifically cybernetics and systems art)

    Research overview

    My research focuses on modern and contemporary Latin American Art, with an emphasis on the politics of aesthetics and on the study of liveness, presence, corporeality, and agency in artistic practice—ranging from painting through to performance and the moving image. My work is shaped by feminism, ecology, an interest in the senses other than vision, and the intersection of art and technology.

    My publications include the monograph Touched Bodies: The Performative Turn in Latin American Art (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019), the essay collection Marcos Kurtycz: Corporeality Unbound (Fauna-Jumex, 2024), and the edited volumes The New Public Art: Collectivity and Activism in Mexico Since the 1980s (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2023), Sabotage Art: Politics and Iconoclasm in Contemporary Latin America (NY-London: I.B. Tauris, 2016, edited with Sophie Halart), and Eugenio Polgovsky: Poetics of the Real/La poética de lo real (Mexico City: Ambulante-Tecolote Films, 2020).

    Research Centres and Institutes

  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Supervision

    Supervisions external to Birkbeck:
    1
    Supervisions within Birkbeck:
    4

    I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students interested in undertaking research in any of my areas of specialism. 

    Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

    • PATRICIA BONCHRISTIANO
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor,
      Title of thesis:
      Forest Matter: Art and Activism in the Brazilian Amazon
      Awarded:
      2024
    • PATRICIA BONCHRISTIANO
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor, to
      Title of thesis:
      Forest Matter: Art and Activism in the Brazilian Amazon
      Awarded:
      2024

    Teaching

    My teaching is centred on non-Western art histories in the 20th and 21st centuries. It fosters a critical awareness of questions related to gender, colonial legacies, ecology, cultural transference, and migration. 

    At BA and MA levels, I supervise dissertations on World art in the 20th and 21st centuries; Latin American Art; Feminism; Performance, video, installation and film; Public Art; Art and politics/technoscience; Indigeneity; Ecology; and the politics of artistic display.

    Teaching modules

    • Art and Society Between 1900 and the Present (AHVM011S5)
    • MA Dissertation (AHVM019D7)
  • Publications

    Publications

    Article

    Book

    Book Section

  • Business and community

    Business and community

    I have media training.

    Media

    I am happy to receive enquiries from the media on the following topics:

    • Latin American History and Culture
    • Art and politics
    • Public Art