Trade Windings: De-Lineating the American Tropics
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Trade winds were the currents of air that brought Columbus to the Americas in 1492—an event that led to the establishment of trade routes across the Atlantic in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Western history has canonized this era as one of “exploration and discovery,” marked by economic, technological, and cultural “progress.” This narrative, however, neglects the realities of mass displacement, enslavement, and extraction that enabled this time of imperial prosperity. This exhibition interrogates the history and legacy of trade routes by mapping them in relation to the economic and migratory realities of today. Working across media and with an expansive range of materials, including colonial products such as coffee, tea, gunpowder, silver and cotton. The artists in this exhibition expose the structural and material dimensions of coloniality while highlighting the ways it continues to haunt the world today.
participating artists: Tania Bruguera, Rafael Ferrer, Noé Martínez, Ana Mendieta, Dalton Paula, Howardena Pindell, Emilio Rojas, Xaviera Simmons, Juana Valdés, Carrie Mae Weems.
curated by: Cecilia González Godino, Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow.
Immigrant Biennale
Conflictual Distance - Central Exhibition
Artists: Golnar Adili, Marcelo Brodsky, Pritika Chowdhry, Erika DeFreitas, Maria Kulikovska, Young Joo Lee, Keli Safia Maksud, Mila Panic, Jovencio de la Paz, Emilio Rojas, Nida Sinnokrot, Slinko, Rafael Yaluff
Opening Reception: November 16th, 2023 6-8pm
Arena: Performance: Emilio Rojas: “Open Wound: A Gloria” December 9th 2023
Field Work: Online Roundtable: “Ukraine, Making Art in Times of War” date TBD
EFA PROJECT SPACE
323 W 39th St,
New York, NY 10018
Tezcatl (Smoking Mirror) at MASS MOCA Magical Thinking Symposium with Katiushka Melo
Magical Thinking is a free public symposium exploring causal, alogical, and ritualistic modes of knowledge formation co-convened by artist manuel arturo abreu and curator, writer, and art historian Laurel V. McLaughlin in dialogue with MASS MoCA Director of Public Programs, Lisa Dent. It invites audiences to see signs, relationships, and links within the material and spiritual worlds through performances, lectures, poetry readings, experimental media presentations, and sound activations.
Participants: manuel arturo abreu, DB Amorin, fields harrington, sidony o’neal, Jonathan González, and Africanus Okokon, Emilio Rojas, Tavia Nyong’o, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Rebecca Schneider, M. nourbeSe Philip, and S*an D. Henry Smith.
Tracing a Wound Through My Body Emerson Contemporary
Emerson Contemporary- Boston, Massachusetts.
Curated by Laurel McLaughlin
Emilio Rojas: tracing a wound through my body is the first survey of the contemporary and multidisciplinary practice of artist Emilio Rojas (c. 1985 Mexico City). The exhibition brings together Rojas’s works spanning the past decade, including live performances and performance-films, documents of performance sustained in ephemera, photography, installation, poetry, and new commissions in his series “m(Other)s” in a meditation upon the trace—or that which is left behind. What borderlands, memories, temporalities, and politics do traces conjure in their indexicality or ephemerality? And how might traces embody the vicissitudes of trauma and resilience?
Residency at Grace Exhibition Space
For the whole month of April, Emilio Rojas will be in Residency at Grace Exhibition in New York City. Organizing performance events with his students at Parsons The New School, and Bard College. As well as doing a final presentation at the end of the month.