Artist Statement
I am an artist and experimental documentarian, living in New Orleans, Louisiana. My methodology follows a dual approach, combining art as social practice with the artist-as-archivist genre.
Margot Herster is a New Orleans-based artist who engages archiving practices, interdisciplinary collaboration and media theory to document contemporary cultural and political phenomena. Since 2005, she has developed an ongoing, archive-based project, titled, After You’ve Been Burned by Hot Soup You Blow in Your Yogurt.
Venues for her context-specific installations include Columbia University, New York, NY; NYU Cantor Film Center, New York, NY; Future Places Digital Media Festival, Porto Portugal; University of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA; Exit Art, New York, NY; and Moving Walls 13, New York, NY, among others. Her exhibitions feature extensive programming, such as lectures by critic David Levi Strauss on Abu Ghraib, Center for Constitutional Rights, President Michael Ratner on Guantanamo legal advocacy; discussions with scholars, military and human rights practitioners; and integration into freshman foundation curriculum at UC Santa Cruz.
Features and reviews of Herster’s work have appeared in National Public Radio, Houston Chronicle, Harpers Magazine, Al Jazeera English, Artnet, American Photo’s State of the Art, and Glasstire, among many others. The Guantanamo Project is featured in A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, one of the first surveys of post-9/11 art, published by Duke University Press.
Open Society Institute, School of Visual Arts Alumni Association, Puffin Cultural Foundation, Kresge College at UCSC, and the University of Texas School of Law are supporters of Herster’s work, through grants and commissions.
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