Moving Forward While Looking Back

This grouping of artists presents a mosaic of spaces, a web of social territories against the backdrop of a politicized landscape. Although distinct in their subject matter and form, the intertwinement of national identity, cultural materiality, and colonial spatial charting link Pedro Barbáchano, Reihan Ebrahimi's, and Chris M. Forsyth's bodies of work together.  Pedro Barbáchano's portraits and video interviews in the series So you understand me, my friend, demonstrate how the shaping of public spheres carry societal values that seep into the private domain. Portraying the stakes of queerness in contemporary Egypt by creating space for conversations about surveillance, self-monitoring, and control, Barbáchano proposes a reflection on modes of embodiment of risk and disposability, inscribing safety as a precarious state and a fragile balance. In The Garden of Memories, Ebrahimi uses clay as a platform to translate Iran's complex socio-political and economic dynamics. Her material exploration acutely examines how material culture carries traceable histories of colonial spatial divisions, intergenerational disconnections, and civil strife against local governance. The reproduction of floral patterns found in Persian design illustrates the omnipresence of the traditional allegorical gardens as a central stage binding past, present, and future to further investigate the retention of history. In Chris M. Forsyth's photographic series Keep Direction By Good Methods, inconspicuous and crumbling structures were once signs of modern progress, highlighting a turning-point in spatial literacy and capitalist expansionism. Forsyth's series recounts a shift from the limits of the ground and naval modes of transportation to aerial hauling's vast possibilities.  Dotting the landscape across the United-States, these concrete arrows enabled a new age of mobility, one that is continually increasing in pace, folding geographical borders and distances, further propelling neo-colonial agendas nationally and internationally.  

- Geneviève Wallen, exhibition Coordinator