Silvia Kolbowski is an Argentine-born American artist who works primarily with video and installation formats, as well as photography, often using historical figures and events to analyze cultural phenomena and power imbalances.

Kolbowski maintains anonymity visually by filming only the hands of the respondents as they speak, later projected at large scale in a room separate from the audio.

Although in the title Kolbowski identifies this work as a “history” of conceptual art, and the ensuing testimonies, at first, appear to constitute an archive of documentary evidence supporting that claim to historicity, by qualifying that history as inadequate, Kolbowski foregrounds the fallacies inherent in claims to stable historical fact.

Her video projects on Ulrike Meinhof and Rosa Luxemburg reanimate historical figures who speak to contemporary issues of violence and political resistance.

She has taught at the Whitney Independent Research Program, the CCC program of the Ecole Superiéure d'Art Visuel, Geneva, the Architecture Department of Parsons The New School for Design, NY, and the School of Art at The Cooper Union.