María Teresa
Arozena Bonnet

PhD in Fine Arts. Artist, photographer and teaching researcher attached to the Department of Fine Arts at the University of La Laguna (ULL). She was a lecturer at the European University of the Canary Islands. Her research focuses on photography and post-documentary artistic practices. Her work as an artist revolves around the photographic medium and new technologies. Her work has been exhibited in different national and international centres and museums, such as the CAAM in Gran Canaria, the Centro de Arte La Regenta, the Centro de Arte Juan Ismael, in Fuerteventura, the MIAC in Lanzarote, TEA, the Nabi Art Center in Seoul, Korea, the Primavera Fotográfica in Barcelona, the Dakar Biennial or the Photography Encounters in Arles. His last two solo exhibitions "Menos es nada", and "Parade" could be seen at the Fundación Mapfre in Tenerife in 2016, and at the Centro de Arte La Regenta in 2017 respectively, both with publications. He is currently preparing a solo exhibition at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM) in Gran Canaria for the year 2024 in which he reflects on landscape. As part of his research and creative process, he has developed different workshops, given lectures, and published several essays on image in books and magazines. He is also a curator: in 2011 he carried out a curatorship with publication at TEA-Tenerife Espacio de Las Artes based on the photographic collections of the COFF-Colección Ordóñez Falcón de Fotografía, entitled "Algo falta. El significado fugado en la fotografía", focused on offering a transversal reading of photography as a key piece to understand and interpret the social evolution and the meaning of the public in our societies. In 2021, artistic director of the XVI International Photography Biennial FOTONOVIEMBRE 21, in charge of the general curatorship, direction and coordination of the festival, which was developed under the title "Reassemblage". Through 16 venues and exhibition halls, 21 exhibitions were displayed, offering a space for reflection that aimed to transcend the mere consumption of the object of photography, inviting instead the public to approach a broader genealogy of photographic practices, and resituating these as a mechanism of essential transversal relation in the social evolution. A total of 136 artists participated, who, under the encompassing framework of the festival, offered different approaches to the fact that the images that a society generates are the true black boxes of the ship, which provide us with the necessary data to know who we are. Within the Biennale, he also designs, directs and develops different public programmes that highlight the way in which images constitute complex systems of communication, conversations traversed by textual and iconic chains. Thus, the seminar "Devices of Photography", in which various thinkers and curators reflected on the visibility of the fields of relations that lie beneath the need to produce and manage photographic images; the audiovisual cycle "The Rectangle in the Hand", with a series of projections that expanded on the underlying themes of the official exhibitions. And "Paper Arm", a specific public programme on photographic print culture.