Emilio Rojas: tracing a wound through my body was the first traveling survey exhibition of the contemporary and multidisciplinary practice of artist Emilio Rojas (born 1988, Mexico City). Accompanied by a bilingual exhibition catalog featuring an interview with Ernesto Pujol, essays by Valeria Luiselli, Rebecca Schneider, Laurel V. McLaughlin, Ethan Madarieta, Mechtild Widrich and Andreir Pop and poetry of Pamela Sneed in collaboration with Rojas.

The exhibition explores works spanning 15 years including live performances and video, documents of performance sustained in ephemera, photography, installation, poetry, and new commissions 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? 

Recognizing the act of tracing dualistically, Emilio Rojas: tracing a wound through my body reexamines both the instrumentalization of Rojas’s body within his practice also reckons with the compounded political and colonial traces impressed upon marginalized bodies, abstracted geopolitical territories, public monuments, and collectivities. For Rojas, such reckonings render palpable what Chicana, queer, and feminist theorist Gloria E. Anzaldúa acknowledged as
heridas abiertas, or “open wounds.”

Emilio Rojas: tracing a wound through my body was curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin and presented at Lafayette College Galleries, Easton, PA; Emerson Contemporary, Boston, MA; Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, VT; and the North Carolina Museum of Art (formerly SECCA), Winston-Salem, NC.