“This exhibition centers on the selection from three photographic series by the renowned Salvadoran artist and activist Muriel Hasbun (b. 1961) and two installations by younger, Houston-affiliated artists of Salvadoran descent—Stephanie Concepción Ramírez (b. 1984) and Jessica Carolina González (b. 1995). Representing two distinct generations that bookmark the Salvadoran Civil War (1979–92), all three reappropriate personal and official archives found in El Salvador and the United States to address violent legacies of the war and its effects on Salvadoran individuals and communities both in their motherland and in exile.

Hasbun draws upon a diverse array of archives—from family albums, through the medical records from her father’s dental office and documents from her mother’s pioneering contemporary art gallery El laberinto, to the seismographic repository of El Salvador—to meditate on the complex negotiations and forces involved in the construction and preservation of personal and collective identities and memories. Similarly, relying on “archives of blood” and the official US immigration documents and their material support, Concepción Ramírez and González extend Hasbun’s reflection to examine the impact of the US-sponsored Civil War and the resulting trauma on the children of survivors and refugees. The products of the diaspora engendered by the war, Concepción Ramírez and González illuminate resonant political and psychological demands in the diasporic context where “belonging” constitutes a much more precarious proposition.

Hasbun, Concepción Ramírez, and González ask pertinent questions about loss, mourning, affective recovery, and rebuilding of personal lives and communities in exile. While doing so, they also ask equally pertinent questions about the common assumptions related to the indexical character of the photography and related media. In their work, records and their archives reveal as much as they obscure, always superseded by imagination, desire, and affect.”

Dorota Biczel, Ph.D., Guest Curator