With a research based and process driven practice, Esmeralda Conde Ruiz’s installations, sculptures, and performances explore the complexities of digital society, its relationship to cultural phenomena and societal change. She investigates the threads that connect us as humans, our shared histories and collective identity.
Responding to architectural spaces, Conde Ruiz creates artworks which make visible hidden elements of our technological society, expressing how these affect our emotional lives. With materials such as lighting gels, handmade bioplastics, glass and choral sound, she creates abstract, colour-filled environments which seek to instigate a raw, emotional response from the viewer. By finding a different language through colour to embody the nuances of emotion, her work aims to provoke conversations about complex changes, encouraging viewers to reconsider their relationship with technology, each other and the world.
Drawing inspiration from digital forms of communication, colour psychology and linguistic anthropology, Conde Ruiz works collaboratively with sociologists, researchers, and computer scientists. In doing so she positions herself as an observer - drawing on her understanding to create works that reflect her reality, an incomprehensible and overwhelming experience of digitised human relationships within a constructed world from which nature is strangely absent.
Her work has been inspired by research papers such as ‘Digital Transformations’ (Buechner, 2022), ‘Digital Loneliness’ (Jacobs, 2024), ‘The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud’ (Gonzales Monserrate, 2022) and growing ecological consciousness including research into seaweed as a material. In this way her work has most recently started to investigate the use of organic materials to reflect the consequences of the technological carbon footprint.
Conde Ruiz holds a Master's degree in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Somers Gallery, London (2025); Burghof, Loerrach (2024); HELLERAU European Centre for the Arts, Dresden (2023). Conde Ruiz’s work has been featured in group exhibitions, including ACUD Gallery, Berlin (2025); SCHAUWERK Sindelfingen, Sindelfingen (2024); Tulca Gallery, Galway (2022); Tate Modern, London (2022); Matadero, Madrid (2021). She has contributed to major programmes including Ether’s Bloom at Gropius Bau, Berlin (2024), and was keynote speaker at the DEGEM Symposium, Luebeck (2023). She has collaborated with artists and musicians including Yoko Ono, Olafur Eliasson, Nick Cave, Peter Liversidge, Susan Philipsz, Matthew Herbert, Lina Lapelytė, and Mira Calix. Conde Ruiz is the recipient of the Fellowship at Creative Armenia (2022), Award of Excellence, IndieFest (2015) and was nominated for the Human AI Art Award, Kunstmuseum Bonn (2024).
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