Description
This catalog was printed in conjunction with the exhibition Huellas de Existencia | Traces of Existence, on display in the Main Gallery from April 6 – June 9, 2024, featuring the work of Alejandro Cartagena, Muriel Hasbun, and Alejandro Luperca Morales.
Exhibition Statement
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.
About the Artists
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’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.
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).
