Opening reception for Emilio Rojas exhibition "tracing a wound through my body"

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | The first traveling survey of the multidisciplinary practice of Emilio Rojas, “tracing a wound through my body” examines the artist’s reckonings with the legacies of colonial and border traumas. 

For Rojas, such reckoning renders palpable visible and invisible wounds through the radically political instrumentalization of his body. Artworks ranging from live performances and interventions to video, photography, sculpture, installation and poetry relate to Rojas’s migratory experience and his rigorous research-based practice. Drawing upon queer and decolonized methodologies, his performative works interrogate structures of colonialism and border politics. The exhibition takes place in a moment in which nativist rhetoric and xenophobic immigration legislation in the United States and beyond deepens wounds already open. Rojas’s practice not only confronts the historical precedents for such trauma but also speculates upon Chicana cultural theorist Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s proposition of the wound transforming into a pathway for healing.

Curated by Laurel McLaughlin.