Tatiana Mesa Paján
Tatiana Mesa Paján is a process-based artist with a particular focus on poetic gesturesShe expresses her ideas across various media, including performance, installation, ready-made, printmaking, artist books, and poetic prose. The language she ultimately selects for her work varies, depending on questions of documentation and memory. While the forms of her artwork change, her sensibility remains rooted in archeological, anthropological, and linguistic studies. Her research is based on an archeology of her present, fascinated by human nature and subjectivity. She attempts to read the life experience through the lens of art, treating such experience as art material. The artist grapples with questions of documentation and the ethical implications of what is shared and what is hidden. She defines her pieces as poetic gestures that are often indeterminate, collections of everyday memories such as kissing, touching, walking, or any imaginable simple gestures. Some works may span a lifetime; while others are ongoing collections over many years. The Experience lived escapes, impossible to grasp. Any evoked experience is a memory built through the medium she chooses whether word, or installation. This limitation of attaining the real moment allows her to decide how she sees, remembers, and shares each life experience.
Tatiana Mesa Paján (b. 1981) is an artist born in Havana, Cuba, who moved to the United States in 2013 and currently lives and works in Tampa, Florida. She is a process-based artist whose practice is centered on relationships, memory, and the poetics of everyday gestures, often working through the collection and recontextualization of objects as carriers of experience. Mesa was a founding member of the Department of Public Intervention (DIP) in Havana and co-curated Experiencia de Acción: 30 días for the 8th Havana Biennial (2003). Her work has been exhibited internationally in Cuba, the Netherlands, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Lithuania, and the United States, and her creative writing has been published both online and in print in Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, and the United States. She graduated from the San Alejandro Academy (1999), the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana (2004), and received her MFA from the University of South Florida (2022), where she currently serves as an Assistant Professor in the Printmaking Department. Her work is included in collections such as The John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art (2026), OXH Gallery in Tampa (2026), and the Rollins College Cornell Fine Arts Museum (2025). Mesa’s practice often treats collected materials—lost objects, mirrors, images of the past, human hair, and submerged or weathered things—as relics of lived experience, functioning as evidence of encounters, touch, and memory rather than the experiences themselves.