Kristel Rigaud

Kristel Rigaud (b. 1993) is a Curaçaoan visual artist that is currently based in The Hague, the Netherlands. She attended the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, where she specialized in painting (BA, 2017), and obtained her MA Fine Arts at the HKU, University of the Arts Utrecht, the Netherlands (2022). She is interested in the question what language is and what it can be. Most recently, she focusses on the fakeness of literary language, which she explores by dissecting her paintings and drawings, and adopting their segments as characters in a possible fictive language. These characters often transform into performative pieces, where the viewer can experience a dialogue between the artist and her work (struggles and all), and her desire to slowly change existing expectations and norms around (the use of) language, reframing the heteronormative, ableist, racist, colonial powers that hold language in their grip today.