Alián Rives
Transcoding the Museum

On view: Feburary 19 - March 16, 2025

Reception: Saturday, March 1, 2025 – 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
University of Miami Gallery, Wynwood Building
2750 NW 3rd Avenue, Suite 4
Miami, FL 33127

The University of Miami presents Transcoding the Museum, an exhibition by Master of Fine Arts candidate Alián Rives. 

Transcoding the Museum investigates New Media Art's role in analyzing cultural representation, institutional power, and technological mediation within museum contexts. The project integrates historical data, anthropological insights, and digital art techniques to interrogate how ritual artifacts transform from functional objects into polysemic symbols, from cult artifacts to exhibition items in Western exhibitions.

It employs digital and physical interventions—generative video, sculpture, and augmented reality installations—to reveal the ideological frameworks shaping the display of cultural artifacts from the Lowe Art Museum. Drawing on the theories of Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Jean Baudrillard, and Lev Manovich while referencing the evolution of institutional critique, the project challenges the museum's power dynamics over tribal and pre-Columbian artifacts. Using Manovich’s principles of new media, the exhibition reimagines artifact representation and exposes institutional hierarchies through digital methodologies.

There will be a reception for the artist on Saturday, March 1, 2025, from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

ABOUT THE ARTIST 

Alián Rives was born in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba and lives and works in Miami, Florida. Rives received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida (2021) and the New World School of the Arts in Art and Technology. Rives uses art to describe his experience living in the Cuban diaspora. He intends to offer a critique of archive metanarratives exposing systems of power. Selected Solo exhibitions include "140, 8 cm3 of Sponge Bought from a Repossessed Man” (2017), Art Basel, Miami, Florida, "Recycler" (2014), General Provincial Museum, Cuba, "De - Capitación" (2011), Oscar Fernández Morera Art Gallery, Sancti Spíritus, Cuba.

Selected group exhibitions include “Mangroves to Masterpieces” (2025), South Florida Cultural Consortium, “Converging Plateaus” (2024), MOCAA, Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas, Miami, Florida, "The MFA Show" (2022), The Bonnier Gallery, Miami, Florida, “Graduate Exhibition” (2022), UM Gallery, Miami, Florida, “Unspecified Void” (2021), Moore Building, Miami, Florida. Rives received South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship, the Douglas Turner Grant (2020), the 42nd Annual Honors Day Awards (2017), MDC, Miami, Florida, the First Prize “PIXELART” (2013), 3rd Digital Art Show, Oscar Fernández Morera Art Gallery, Cuba, First Prize, “Belquis Ayón Engraving Exhibition” (2011), Cuba, and work is in the public collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas (MOCAA), Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, Miami Dade College (MDC), Florida, Manuel de Jesus Lara Medical Center, Oscar Fernández Morera Art Gallery, and Vladislav Volkov Pedagogical School, Cuba.

Transcoding the Museum is on view until March 16, 2025, at the University of Miami Gallery, Wynwood Building, 2750 NW 3rd Ave, Suite 4, Miami, FL 33127. Open Wed-Fri, 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., or by appointment. Call (305) 284-3161 to confirm.

For information about the gallery and our online offerings, please visit https://art.as.miami.edu/ or contact Milly Cardoso, Gallery Manager and Curator, m.cardoso1@miami.edu. Follow us on Instagram @umartgalleries. 

Image: Courtesy of Alián Rives.