Subversive Kin: The Act of Turning Over

March 4 - April 9th, 2021 Abrazo Interno Gallery at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center OPENING RECEPTION - March 4, 2021, 5 - 8PM **Because of health restrictions, we are requiring guests to RSVP to attend the event during 1-hour time slots.

Curated by Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen

With works by Christine Howard-Sandoval, Tatiana Arocha, Karen Miranda Rivadeneira, and Bel Falleiros

This exhibition brings together a group of female-identified artists whose practice stems from their embedded relation to land and to original practices and traditions from their places of birth or ancestry.

Spanning video, photography, poetry, installation and painting, the works of these artists suggest the need to reconsider the place of human beings in the world and proposes a repositioning where nature and humans have agency and enact a shared subjectivity.

This exhibition was initially scheduled to be presented in April 2020, and was postponed in accordance with the world efforts to stop the spread of the Coronavirus. The current happenings in the world have added an underlying aspect to this exhibition as it puts in perspective our connections with the land and with others, and invites us to think of radical hope to create structures of care that stem from our relationships with what is sacred to us. The artists in the exhibition have spent time with native communities, learning about their ancestors, and rebuilding a vision and cosmology that allows them to actively turn over to a different path, and to share and transmit knowledge.

The notion of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and the need of imagining “new” relationships between people and nature are at the core of this exhibition, and aim to contribute to the restoration of our relationship to the land through sharing different ways of connecting with each other, to nature, to our ancestors, as a whole. “It is said that should the remaining people choose the path toward life, they will turn back along the road from which they have come and begin to pick up the pieces that have been scattered along the road– remnants of language, the old stories and songs, seeds and ragged patches of plants, wandering animals and birds, and together they will be put back together again.” — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Restoration and Reciprocity: The Contributions of Traditional Ecological Knowledge.

As artists, poets, women, these artists set the space to think in terms of reciprocity, establishing relationships instead of ownerships, and reminding that our relationships are transformed by our choice of perspective.