Claudia Casarino

Claudia Casarino (b. 1974, Asunción, Paraguay) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work examines gender, the body, migration, labor, memory, and the structural forms of violence that shape women's lives. Working primarily through installation, sculpture, textiles, drawing, and performance, Casarino has developed a visual language in which clothing—particularly the empty garment—becomes a powerful surrogate for the absent, displaced, controlled, or resistant body.

Textiles are central to Casarino's practice, both as material and as carriers of cultural and personal memory. She frequently works with tulle, a translucent fabric associated with veils, dresses, celebrations, and rites of passage. Cut, sewn, suspended, layered, or emptied of the bodies they might contain, her garments simultaneously reveal and conceal. Their physical delicacy contrasts with the histories of violence, domestic labor, migration, exploitation, and social expectation that they evoke.

Casarino's work is deeply informed by the experiences of women in Paraguay and across Latin America while extending outward to broader questions of power and visibility. Her installations frequently address the ways women's bodies are defined by political borders, economic systems, inherited social roles, and forced movement. Absence itself becomes a recurring presence: hollow dresses, translucent forms, shadows, and traces suggest bodies that have disappeared, migrated, been silenced, or remain insufficiently seen.

In recent work, Casarino has expanded these concerns to consider care, medicinal plants, women's labor, and the transmission of knowledge and memory across generations. Personal and family histories intersect with larger political and social structures, allowing intimate materials and experiences to become vehicles for examining conditions shared by women across different geographies.

Casarino has maintained an extensive international exhibition practice since the late 1990s. She represented Paraguay in the Latin American Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale and has participated in five editions of the MERCOSUR Biennial, as well as the Havana, Busan, Cuenca, Curitiba and Algeria biennials, BIENALSUR, and the Santiago, Tijuana, and Puerto Rico triennials.

At Haw Contemporary, Casarino presented Sleep Disorder in 2017, an exhibition using garments associated with sleep and domestic intimacy to explore vulnerability, safety, and the body at rest. She returned in 2025 with Stitched in Silence: The Tension Lies Elsewhere, which examined fashion as a system in which beauty, identity, discipline, power, and violence converge, particularly in relation to women's bodies. She was also included in the group exhibition Night in 2014.

Recent international presentations include Corte in São Paulo and Ghosts: Visualizing the Supernatural at Kunstmuseum Basel, alongside exhibitions in Spain, Chile, and Washington, D.C.

Casarino's work is held in prominent public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence; Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria; Museo Wifredo Lam and Casa de las Américas, Havana; Museo del Barro, Asunción; and the Inter-American Development Bank Art Collection, Washington, D.C., among others.

Casarino studied at the Instituto Superior de Arte of the National University of Asunción and pursued additional studies in New York and London. She lives and works in Asunción, Paraguay.