Edison Peñafiel (b. 1985, Guayaquil, Ecuador) is a Miami-based interdisciplinary artist whose immersive installations transform architectural spaces into sites of collective reckoning with migration, power, and disappearance.

His work has been presented at institutions including The Ringling Museum, Sarasota; CA2M – Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Madrid; the Mint Museum, Charlotte; the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; the Orlando Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami; and The Bass Museum, Miami Beach. International exhibitions include BIENALSUR at MUNTREF Museo de la Inmigración, Buenos Aires; the Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan, Puerto Rico; Passerelle Centre d'Art Contemporain, Brest, France; and CA2M, Madrid. He has participated in ARCO Madrid and Art Düsseldorf with Sabrina Amrani.

Peñafiel's solo installation MARE MAGNVM, presented at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum and Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid, marked the first chapter of an ongoing trilogy — The Mare Magnvm Cosmology — exploring migration and myth. The second chapter, De Profundis Clamavi ad Astra, premieres at Locust Projects during Miami Art Week 2026 with support from the VIA Art Fund.

He is the recipient of the VIA Art Fund Artistic Production Grant, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Creative Research Grant, the Knight Arts Challenge Award, the Premio ARCO Comunidad de Madrid, and the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship. His work is held in public collections including CA2M, Madrid; The Ringling Museum, Sarasota; Oolite Arts, Miami; and Elsewhere Museum, North Carolina.

He has participated in residencies at The Watermill Center, MASS MoCA, Anderson Ranch, and McColl Center for Art + Innovation. Peñafiel is represented by Sabrina Amrani, Madrid, and Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami.

STATEMENT

Edison Peñafiel constructs immersive environments where migration, myth, and transformation are experienced as cosmological conditions rather than historical events. Working with projection, sound, textile, and architectural form, his practice builds a continuous, self-governing cosmology in which meaning emerges through immersion, duration, and the passage between states.

The work draws from converging philosophical frameworks: Andean cosmovision, Gnosticism, Hermeticism. These are not regional or doctrinal references but parallel grammars for how cultures structure descent, threshold, and emergence. In the Andean system, hanan pacha, kay pacha, and uku pacha are fluid states of existence, not fixed locations. His installations materialize these states spatially: environments the viewer must enter and navigate, where the boundary between water and light, history and myth, dissolution and return remains deliberately unstable.

MARE MAGNVM placed 81 archetypal figures — masked, unlocatable, stripped of national identity — into perpetual migration across a projected sea. De Profundis Clamavi ad Astra descends into the oceanic underworld of that same system, where historical violence, mythological figures, and material transformation converge. Arcturus, the forthcoming third work, extends the cosmology into open space.

These works are not sequential chapters but interrelated spatial conditions: an expanding cosmological field where oceanic depth, stellar distance, and human displacement form one continuous structure of transformation and return.