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

The exhibition explores works spanning 15 years 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 border-lands, 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. McLaughli