We often measure our existence by the objects we hold, our memories, and the stories told through generations. Traces of Existence unites these three artists, each speaking to ideas of migration, history, reminiscence, family, and existence through their constructed imagery, such as collage, visual juxtapositions, and physical manipulations.

Using photographs, video and installation, these visual narratives reflect the artists’ exploration of identity, their relationship with their homeland, and the socio-political issues of Latin America and the United States. The highly charged political language used to identify immigrants as others exacerbates the complexity of the already cultural, emotional and physical barriers we establish, both real and arbitrary lines of existence. The artists of Traces work to connect the physical landscape with the memory of what is left behind. 

Focusing on what is often unseen or overlooked, these artists tell the stories of transition, relocation, and exile. Using vernacular photography, Alejandro Cartagena‘s Foto Structures connotes the issues of anonymity and identity. Muriel Hasbun‘s Pulse: New Cultural Registers reframes the cultural legacy of El Salvador during the 1980s and ’90s by layering the earth’s seismographic movements with archival photographs of the artist’s family. Alejandro Luperca Morales shows us in real-time the transition between the US and Mexico; viewers watch a migration point on the border; with each anonymous crossing, we witness their relocation. 

These three distinct narratives, underscore the profoundly personal and individual nature of immigration, relocation and cultural memory of what is left behind. 

Alejandro Cartagena: Photo Structure / Foto Estructura

Alejandro Cartagena sifts through landfills in the outskirts of Mexico City to collect discarded photographs. His finds—thousands of portraits, snapshots, and tourist views—remind him of photographs he encountered while employed at the photograph archive (Fototeca) of the state of Nuevo León. Photographs are deposited at the Fototeca because they are considered important to Nuevo León’s cultural, political, and social history. At institutional repositories like the Fototeca, archivists arrange, preserve, and describe photographs and make them available to researchers and the public. Through these processes, archived photographs form part of the historical record. In the archive, they command evidential authority they otherwise might not have.

Cartagena’s found photographs, deposited in a landfill and not an archive, have no such authority. What meaning is left in a photograph once it has been discarded? Under what circumstances might it have meaning? To explore these questions, Cartagena takes on the role of archivist, carefully arranging and re contextualizing his collection of castoffs.

Alejandro Cartagena, Mexican (b. 1977, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His projects employ landscape and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban, and environmental issues. Cartagena’s work has been exhibited internationally in more than 50 group and individual exhibitions in spaces including the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris and the CCCB in Barcelona, and his work is in the collections of several museums including the San Francisco MOMA, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, The MFAH in Houston, the Portland Museum of Art, The West Collection, the Coppel collection, the FEMSA Collection, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the George Eastman House and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and among others.

Muriel Hasbun: Pulse: New Cultural Registers / Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales

Is it possible to trace our journey through a visual record of the land’s pulses? Can we metaphorically mark our personal and cultural legacies onto the land and in the process make it our terruno and diasporic homeland?

Pulse: New Culture Registers is a visual registry for the future, reframing the cultural legacy of El Salvador during the 1980’s and 90’s using personal and historical archives from a diasporic vantage point. It imprints the rescued archive of the renowned Galeria el laberinto – an epicienter of cultural activity during the Salvadoran civil war – along with my own photographic archive of the time onto the national seismographic record of El Salvador.

Pulse encapsulates issues of social justice, representation and solidarity that are at stake in the art world and in society. Transnational dialogue and decolonial visual representations are urgent. With 2.3 million Salvadorans living in the United States, we are the third largest Latinx population, often vilified by reductive, dehumanizing narratives of war, violence and migratory “illegality”.

I challenge erasure, invisibility, prejudice and established canons and territories, paying tribute to my late mother, Janine Janowski and her legacy and founding director of Galeria el laberinto, and to the artists who worked with the gallery during such difficult times. Pulse then, transforms the land into a fully lived and witnessed Thirdspace of memory and art, while mapping personal and collective history into a meeting ground for a more hopeful, nuanced, dignified and restorative future.

Muriel Hasbun’s expertise as an artist and as an educator focuses on issues of cultural identity,
migration and memory. Through an intergenerational, transnational, and transcultural lens, Hasbun
constructs contemporary narratives and establishes a space for dialogue where individual and collective memory spark new questions about identity and place.

Hasbun is the recipient of numerous distinctions, including: the 2021-22 Estelle Lebowitz Endowed Visiting Artist at Rutgers University, a FY21 AHCMC Artist & Scholar Grant, 2020 Sondheim and 2019 Trawick Prize Finalist, a 2019 Archive Transformed CU Boulder Artist/Scholar Collaborative Residency, Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards in Media (2019 and 2008) and in Photography (2015, 2012), CENTER Santa Fe 2018 Producer’s Choice and 2017 Curator’s Choice awards, a FY17 Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County Artist Project Grant, a 2014 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, the Howard Chapnick Grant of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund (2014); a Museums Connect grant of the U.S. Department of State and the American Association of Museums (2011-2012); Artist in Residence at the Centro Cultural de España in San Salvador (2016), and the Escuela de Bellas Artes in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico (2010); the Corcoran’s Outstanding Creative Research Faculty Award (2007) and a Fulbright Scholar Grant (2006-2008).

Similarly, her photographs are in numerous private and public collections, including the Art Museum of the Americas, D.C. Art Bank, En Foco, Lehigh University, El Museo del Barrio, International Development Bank, Smithsonian American Art Museum, University of Texas-Austin, Turchin Center for the Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Building upon her socially engaged art and teaching practice, Muriel Hasbun is the founder and director of laberinto projects, a transnational, cultural memory, and education initiative that fosters contemporary art practices, social inclusion and dialogue in El Salvador and its U.S. diaspora. She is professor emerita at the GWU Corcoran School of Arts & Design, and previously, professor and chair of photography at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. Hasbun received a MFA in Photography (1989) from George Washington University where she studied with Ray K. Metzker (1987-88), and earned an AB in French Literature (1983), cum laude, from Georgetown University.

Alejandro Luperca Morales

Alejandro “Luperca” Morales (Ciudad Juárez, 1990) Graduated from the Bachelor of Art Theory and Criticism at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez (2013). He has taken seminars and workshops, in spaces such as Node Center for Curatorial Studies (2015, 2014), FLACSO-17 Institute of Critical Studies (2013) and University of Chile (2012).

He has given lectures and workshops in spaces such as the Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Centro de la Imagen, the Autonomous University of Mexico, Escuela Adolfo Prieto, Alumnos 47 and the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros. He was recently an Artist-in-Residence for the Whitney Museum’s Youth Insights program.

As an artist, he has participated in the Whitney Biennial 2022 Quiet as it’s kept (New York, 2022); Getxophoto (Basque Country, 2022); Panoramic Festival (Barcelona, 2018); Mexico // The Future is Unwritten (Foundation Benetton Collection, 2015); the XIX and XX Biennial of Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia 2014 – 2016); V Festival A-part (France, 2014); the Belo Horizonte International Festival (Brazil, 2013); the Third Juarez Border Biennial – El Paso (Mexico-USA, 2013), among others.

His book, The portrait of your absence edited by Fernando Gallegos received the Special Mention of the Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award 2022

He was recently awarded the 2022 Photography Acquisition Award by CONARTE, Nuevo León.

His curatorial projects include Index: Archiving the edges of Violence, Rubin Center (2014); Horror Pleni, EAC (Uruguay, 2015), III Salón ACME (CDMX, 2015), Fallas de Origen, MACJ (2016), Miriam Salado: Detritos, Museo de Arte de Sonora (2016) and Francis Alys, Ciudad Juarez projects, ASU Art Museum ( 2017).  He was selected as International Curator of Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño in Bogotá, Colombia (2015). He founded Proyectos Impala, an exhibition space and mobile library in Ciudad Juárez (2016-2018). He participated in the Mexico Curatorial Intensive of the Independent Curators International in 2017.