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Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY), Nicolás Guagnini: Theatre of the Self is a hybrid catalogue-reader based on the multithreaded performances of Buenos Aires–born, New York–based Guagnini. Many of these works, spanning from 2005 to 2019, had never been seen before or had not been seen since their original live presentation.

Raised in Argentina during the violent military dictatorship, Guagnini moved to New York in the late 1990s and co-founded the film production company Union Gaucha Productions with Karin Schneider in 1997. In 2005, Guagnini became co-founder of Orchard Gallery, an artist cooperative based in the Lower East Side. The work in Theatre of the Self is informed in part by autobiography, history, and politics and by Guagnini’s community itself. Some performances were participatory, some were not, but all were made polyvocaly in collaboration with a group of artists with shared interests and concerns around performance and the moving image, including Ei Arakawa, Leigh Ledare, Jeff Preiss, Aura Rosenberg, and Karin Schneider. This publication invites internationally acclaimed art historians, curators, and artists to think about the material in Guagnini’s work within a unique format. Each author focuses on one work in the exhibition that, when viewed as part of the whole, creates a heterogenous profile of the artist’s trajectory. Readers will find contemporary art, film, political science, performance studies, and Latin American studies of interest.