Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

A large embroidery on netting, Vivian Caccuri’s Mosquito Shrine II (2020) tells the story of the arrival of European colonists to the “New World” through the lens of the mosquito. The allegory features the insect as a deranged paramilitary force, alluding to the power of tropical nature and the disaster of man-made structures—poorly planned artificial dams, sugar plantations, slavery—that have made mosquitos both ubiquitous and deadly.

Caccuri creates objects, installations, and performances that seek to reframe everyday experience and, by extension, disrupt traditional narratives. In her work, the conquest of nature in the West takes uncanny forms. Mosquito Shrine II is a result of the artist’s research on eighteenth-century testimonials and records detailing stories of illnesses in the Western hemisphere.

Vivian Caccuri (b. 1986, São Paulo) has participated in the Venice Biennale, São Paulo Biennial, and the Kochi-Muziris Biennial in Kerala, India, and has created commissioned works for the Serpentine Galleries, London; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; the High Line, New York; and Röda Sten Konstall, Göteborg, Sweden, among others. Caccuri is the author of Music is What I Make (2012), awarded the Funarte Prize of Critical Production in Music in 2013, and a contributor to Making It Heard: A History of Brazilian Sound Art (2019).