Quintan Ana Wikswo

QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO is a writer and visual artist. Her adventurous transdisciplinary projects integrate her fiction, poetry, memoir, and essay with her original photographs, performances, and video. A human rights worker for two decades, she now uses salvaged government typewriters and cameras to navigate known, unknown, and occluded worlds, especially obscured sites where crimes against humanity have taken place.

Her works are published, performed, and exhibited throughout the world. Her work appears in a forthcoming collection of photographs and stories The Hope Of Floating Has Carried Us This Far (Coffee House Press), as well as in anthologies, artist books, and magazines such as Tin House, Guernica, Conjunctions, the Kenyon Review, and Gulf Coast. Her projects have received multiple solo museum shows in New York City and Berlin, and are presented in museum exhibitions and collections throughout the United States and Europe.

“Quintan Ana Wikswo’s trenchant interdisciplinary investigation into the sites of massacres and other atrocities is a vivid reminder that art no longer serves religion, but is progressively supplanting it in terms of ritual and sanctity.”
– Thomas Micchelli, Hyperallergic

Inhabiting the intersections of sexuality/gender, warfare/power, and mythology/shamanism, she creates sites for investigation of existential questions about humanity and our societies: how can we maneuver beyond the boundaries that contain us? How is otherness and difference punished in our communities? How can we locate the renegade wonderlands of freedom and liberation, emancipation and self-definition?