Gabriela Duran Barraza’s work takes aesthetic research as its point of departure, bringing together art practice, scientific inquiry and community engagement to explore how knowledge is produced, perceived and shared. Working across installation, participatory projects, new media and research-based practices, she investigates the relationship between conceptual knowledge, visual experience and collective forms of learning. Drawing from neuroaesthetics, art education and social practice, Duran Barraza challenges established ways of understanding artistic experience by connecting scientific methodologies with situated, collaborative and experimental approaches.

Her work often examines the social conditions through which images, objects and meanings acquire value. Rather than treating capitalism as an abstract economic system, Duran Barraza addresses its effects on communities, cultural production and everyday forms of exchange through participatory processes that foreground dialogue and collective agency. By combining artistic research with educational and community-based practices, she creates spaces in which dominant narratives of productivity, value and progress can be questioned and reimagined, proposing alternative modes of knowledge production grounded in participation, care and shared experience.