Soledad Muñoz: We’re Not All Here / No Estamos Todes
@ Chicago Justice Gallery
1344 S Halsted St, Chicago, IL 60607
Opening Friday, September 26th, from 6PM - 8:30PM
On view through Friday, August 7th
We’re Not All Here / No Estamos Todes is a transnational archive of absence. Artist Soledad Muñoz weaves stories of loss and resistance across different geographies together with copper wire and cotton thread. Her exhibit–which includes a series of woven portraits, a sound installation, a film projection, and interactive maps documenting missing and murdered Black and indigenous women and girls–explores the human costs of state violence and abandonment, from Chile to Palestine to the state of Illinois.
In her textile portraits, Muñoz interrogates different facets of attempted erasure, including the murders of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and Palestinian surgeon and administrator Dr. Adnan al-Bursh; the suspicious disappearances of Chilean environmental activist Julia Chuñil and Black, trans woman from Chicago Taylor Casey; and the detention and deportation of Chicago immigrant-solidarity organizer Gladis Yolanda Chavez Pineda, all of which left their communities to contend with their absence.
This compelling solo exhibition pulls on the conceptual threads that connect Muñoz’s previous work on Pinochet-era detenidos desaparecidos, or disappeared detainees, in Chile who opposed the dictatorship, with the Social Justice Initiative’s artistic explorations of collective loss in prior exhibitions that focused on the cases of the 43 kidnapped students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Mexico, and the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and its aftermath. It is particularly urgent in this current time of genocide, repression, and dehumanization to learn from different ways people can respond when the fabric of communities is torn apart.
While each instance of disappearance occurs in its unique context, Muñoz’s work gestures toward a set of common tactics and logic underpinning acts of state violence and exclusion from the protection of the law. Viewed another way, this body of work also concerns itself with how different communities mobilize to mend, remember, and conceptualize justice in the aftermath of immense loss.
We hope you’ll join us.
To RSVP for the opening reception on Friday, 9/26, visit go.uic.edu/WNAH.
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Tags: Chicago, CHICAGO JUSTICE GALLERY, Lola Ayisha Ogbara, Near Wesst Side, Soledad Munoz, UIC, We're Not All Here / No Estamos Todes
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