Carola Bravo, the winner of the Bass Museum’s New Monuments Call

The Bass Museum selected the Venezuelan-American artist Carola Bravo as the winner of the “New Monuments open artist call,” a museum initiative since 2020 that aims to award artists reflecting on the monument, its meaning, and its relevance in the contemporary world. Bravo’s winning project, “Between Absence and Presence,” is a temporary monument to be located in Miami’s Collins Park and could be visited between March 2023 and January 2024.
“Between Absence and Presence” questions the commemorative statue; through a mirror-like surface, the monument returns the viewer’s gaze to themself, asking, “what reflects the notion of the impermanent present better than recognizing invisibility and absence?” In this sense, the gaze no longer rests on a sculpture of a character from the past, but rather the monument asks the observer about the exclusions and absences present in official public sculptures. In short, “Between Absence and Presence” questions the biased monuments of the past and restores agency to the observer.
Carola Bravo’s artistic production is characterized by a geometric and space exploration informed by the desire to account for how the space organization is linked with feelings of belonging, but also of exile and change. As Freddy Carreño exposed in an ArtNexus published article (No. 82, 2012), “Carola Bravo is engaged in that permanent quest; investigating in order to propose new perceptions of space, the artist bases her work on what is near, on the close at hand, and discovers the keys that govern the unfathomable.”
Carola Bravo’s Artnexus article (No. 82):
https://www.artnexus.com/en/magazines/article-magazine-artnexus/5d6404d590cc21cf7c0a356b/86/carola-bravo