Nayla Zarba develops a practice in which storytelling extends beyond language, taking shape through images, objects, and constructed devices. Her work explores the tensions between fiction and memory, archive and experience, creating scenes where the autobiographical intertwines with the imagined. Through a poetics that incorporates absurdity, repetition, and fragmentation, she attempts to register everyday life—each piece functioning as a gesture against forgetting.
Born in Cipolletti, Río Negro, and currently based in Buenos Aires, Zarba studied Art Direction for Film at ENERC and completed a postgraduate degree in Conceptual Design at UNTREF. Her experience in the audiovisual field—where she works within the art department on large-scale productions—deeply informs her artistic practice, particularly in her attention to atmosphere, detail, and the way objects structure both space and narrative.
Her work spans painting, object-making, and installation, often centered on the construction of “impossible objects”: forms that appear familiar yet disrupt their own functional logic. Within these operations, uselessness becomes generative, opening up new associations and meanings. Language also plays a key role in her work, whether as explicit text or as an underlying narrative drive, creating an ongoing dialogue between the visual and the written.
She has participated in group exhibitions in galleries and contemporary art spaces and was awarded a Creation Grant from Argentina’s National Arts Fund. Alongside her practice, she continues her training through programs such as PAC and various workshops with artists and theorists. Zarba’s work proposes a space where remembering, narrating, and transforming experience converge into a single gesture—one that moves between play, language, and memory.
