Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla

Allora born Philadelphia, 1974
Calzadilla born Havana, Cuba, 1971
Both live in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Allora and Calzadilla have worked together since 1997. Their residence in Puerto Rico informs the subject matter of much of their work, which often responds to the geographical location of its production and display. Working in sculpture, photography, video, and installation, they involve viewers and local communities, define political and social issues, and attempt to link distant locations conceptually and physically. For Puerto Rican Light (1998–2003; below) the artists collected sunlight from Puerto Rico using a large photovoltaic battery. They shipped the stored light to London’s Tate Modern, where it powered Dan Flavin’s fluorescent-light sculpture Puerto Rican Light (to Jeanie Blake) 1965 for the duration of the exhibition, thus connecting two disparate locations and making actual the geographical allusion in the title of the Flavin work. For Traffic Patterns (1998; above) at MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they synchronized the gallery lighting system with a traffic light in Puerto Rico. Using a specially designed device connected to a computer chip that was programmed with the time code of the traffic light, the entire room became awash in the same colors as the changing signal on the distant street. In these works and others, Allora and Calzadilla combine humor, poetry, and politics to explore ideas of independence and control in an increasingly global world. Allora and Calzadilla are shortlisted for the Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss prize and were selected for the 2006 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.