Elvin José Díaz Tolentino

Born in 1979 in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic)
Lives and works in in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic)

Elvin José Díaz Tolentino graduated from the Pedro Henriquez Ureña National University (UNPHU), Santo Domingo (2003), and did a postgraduate course in Performance Studies at FLACSO, Santo Domingo (2006). Currently he is pursuing a Master ́s degree in Visual Arts in the Dominican Republic. Since 2014, his “BINATIONAL PROJECT” has explored the theme of the border, interconnection and exchange between two cultures: Haitian and Dominican. The artist has had more than 50 group and solo exhibitions as well as participated in art contests at the Museum of Art in the Bronx and the Museo del Barrio, both in New York. In 2010, he was selected to be part of DVD-Project, a travelling international video-art project organized by Stichting Idee-fixe (The Netherlands). In 2014 the artist presented an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Santo Domingo that explored Video-Art, Video-Installation, Video-Performance and documentation through the video of performance. His work has received many awards in the Dominican Republic.

Elvin José Díaz Tolentino writes of Placenta, his work on view at KB17: “This is a video performance that spawns from an action that takes place at the national border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic in a place called ‘No Man’s Land,’ where a Haitian and a Dominican man blow up a balloon so big they both can get inside until the pressure and movement make it burst. While trying to remain in the balloon, they begin to interact, to converge until the object takes their shape. This video performance provides different views of the same event: the horizontal and frontal views allow us to see in detail how these two men struggle to remain in the same space, and an overhead one permits us to witness the dilemma of two bodies trying to coexist in a limited and fragile space.”