Kianí del Valle Debuts MAPAS / ESPEJOS: First Solo Exhibition at EMBAJADA Gallery

The exhibition marks a milestone in del Valle’s career, bringing her immersive, genre-defying practice to the forefront of Puerto Rico’s contemporary art scene. As an artist in residence at EMBAJADA since 2025, del Valle has developed a body of work that explores the intersection of movement, text, and identity, inviting audiences to experience choreography as a living language. 

MAPAS / ESPEJOS features new works that blend choreography, visual art, and written word, reflecting del Valle’s signature approach to performance and installation. Through this exhibition, she continues her exploration of migration, borders, and postcolonial identity, offering a powerful meditation on the body as both map and mirror.

The exhibition will run at EMBAJADA, the acclaimed Puerto Rican gallery, with an opening reception on Friday, January 30, 2026.

Over the last two decades, Puerto Rican artist Kianí del Valle has worked across disciplines as a director, choreographer, dancer, and playwright. For this exhibition, del Valle presents a series of drawings developed alongside her choreographic practice. These works originate in short stories or written essays that gradually unfold into bodily movement and, in parallel, into graphic form.

The exhibition brings together performative works created between 2018 and 2026, reimagined as movement maps. These drawings function as an experimental system ofnotation, a cartographic language devised to investigate dimension, space, architecture, andintention within each piece. Developed in tandem with her performances, this visual vocabulary forges a connective thread between writing, drawing, and dance.

MAPAS / ESPEJOS AT EMBAJADA

Address:
354 Cll Fernando Primero, San Juan, 00918, Puerto Rico

Vernissage:
Friday, January 30, 6pm until late

Opening Hours:
Fridays and Saturdays, 3pm-7pm, until April 4

Rather than serving solely as documentation, the drawings propose an alternative way of visualizing the body in motion. They trace rhythm, fluidity, and internal narrative, translatingembodied experience into visual signs that are both analytical and poetic. For del Valle, these works act as reflective surfaces, revealing the complexity of the creative process and offering layered aesthetic and conceptual readings of movement itself.

Kianí del Valle is a Berlin-based dancer, choreographer, director, and performance curator originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Driven by anthropological, biological, and sociological concepts, Kianí’s work blurs the lines between contemporary dance and performance art, integrating film, photography, architecture, pop culture, technology, and sound. She has developed interdisciplinary solo works and is the founder and choreographer of the KDV Performance Group.