The Art POP Curatorial Residency
The 2022 Art POP festival edition was co-curated by Bettina Pérez Martínez, a Puerto Rican curator, art historian, and researcher, and Tyra Maria Trono, a filipinx multidisciplinary artist and curator, both currently based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Canada.
At a distance - from within was a group exhibition presented by Art POP and POP Montreal, at Projet Casa from September 16th to October 2nd 2022. The exhibition focused on presenting works related to and created by artists from diverse backgrounds and diasporas. With works by:
Holly Chang — Jin Heewoong — Kuh del Rosario — Laura Acosta et Santiago Tavera — Melissa Raymond et René Sandín — My-Van Dam — Par Nair — Santiago Tamayo Soler.
At a distance - from within draws from the allegory of the seed as an entity that creates a sense of rhizomatic placemaking. This relational form of placemaking refers then to the flourishing of communities, practices, and exchanges that come from diverse and multiple diasporas. The exhibition explores the concept of diaspora through the use of texts by diasporic writers, such as Sundus Abdul Hadi, Stuart Hall, and Édouard Glissant, among others.
About Bettina
Bettina Pérez Martínez (1992) is a Puerto Rican curator, art historian, and researcher based in Montréal, Canada. Her research interests focus on Caribbean identity, diaspora and placemaking practices, decolonial studies, and the politics of ecology and climate change in the region. She is the curator of Seascape Poetics, a virtual exhibition that examines complex relationships with water and ecology in the Caribbean through the work of contemporary artists in the region. Her recent written work addresses Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States as the pivotal agent for the country’s growing economic and social crisis and how this relationship pertains to the representation and exploitation of nature. She holds an MA from Concordia University in Montréal, Québec and a BFA and a BA from the State University of New York, in Purchase, New York. She is a current resident of the Art Volt x POP Montreal curatorial residency and a 2022-2023 fellow for the initiative Bridging the Divide at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in New York.
About Tyra
Tyra Maria Trono is a filipinx multidisciplinary artist and curator based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Canada. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Concordia University. Their work explores the formation of one’s perception within the process of cultural identification. And How, within this formation, their position within the diasporic community redirects the path of this process. In 2017, she co-founded a photo collective called For the Sake of Analog. It has been a platform where artistic contributions that are presented to their collective, are evaluated by and for people whose identities belong to marginalized communities. Trono is a current resident of the Art Volt x POP Montreal curatorial residency and 2022 resident at Céline Bureau in Montreal. She will also be elaborating a guided tour at Papier Contemporary Art Fair in August 2022.
