Born in San José, Costa Rica in 1968, Priscilla Monge is one of the foremost conceptual artists of Central America. Graduating from the University of Costa Rica in 1995 with a degree in painting, she has since embraced a wide variety of mediums, including textiles, video, installation, and photography. Her work explores the violence and brutality that exist in the everyday, often tackling these themes with humor and cynicism.
With her first exhibition, Priscilla no Pintura (Priscilla doesn’t paint), she showed her desire to embrace forms of artistic expression beyond what her traditional arts education had taught. When asked why she turned from her conservative training to focus more on conceptual modalities, she said she needed to be able “to talk about certain things”. This response is often seen quite literally in her work, with text playing a prominent role; a letter delicately embroidered on linen or meditative phrases carved into marble books. For Monge, the written word is a safe space in which she can uncover and discuss what is often unable to be said out loud. “I think most of my doing is about uncovering things, about telling what cannot be told. About the unspeakable.”
To explore the “unspeakable” she often turns to materials in the domestic and scholastic sphere. She employs items such as fabric, chalkboards, soap, and fine china to weave delicate yet arresting narratives of cruelty and innocence, blurring the lines between love and aggression, pleasure and oppression. For her, these everyday materials hold “the possibility of being familiar and unfamiliar at the same time”, allowing her to explore the small everyday atrocities that can permeate our lives. In one such work, Bloody Day, she has sewn a pair of trousers out of sanitary napkins and walked around the streets of San Jose, soaked in her own period blood. Such a work highlights her focus on politicizing the personal and showing the violence that often remains hidden; in this case using the sanitary napkin to bring into the open the internal violence that women must bear within their body’s borders, whilst simultaneously demonstrating the fear and shame of the larger patriarchal society in which they must bear it.
Today, Monge lives and works in San Jose. She has exhibited widely, participating in the Venice and Liverpool Biennials, with works shown in institutions such as the Museo Rufino Tamayo, the Tate Modern, Centro de Arte Contemporaneo in Sevilla and the Museo de Arty y Diseno Contemporaneo in Costa Rica among others.
