Tracing Fragments

Gerðarsafn Museum, 

February 2 - May 21, 2023

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Through acts of stitching, sculpting, weaving, fragmenting, painting, and recording, Kathy Clark, Abdullah Qureshi, Sasha Huber, Frida Orupabo, Hugo Llanes, and Inuuteq Storch reclaim historical methods of handicraft, documentation, representation, and archiving. Their works digest certain generational histories with a delicate yet deliberate touch, marked by a tender sentimentality that critically unpacks stories of colonization, slavery, racism, suppression and dispossession, religious persecution and queerness. The physical-ness of their materials (fabric, the camera, a touch of the hands, the body) mark the works with a cathartic embrace. Each artist examines how we process our personal histories, our genealogy, our nationhood, our sexuality, and our heritage.

 

The artists of Tracing Fragments examine the complicated histories behind colonial and racial violence, repossessing terms like power and victimhood. Realizing the brown, indigenous, and queer body on their own terms, each artist imagines what forms this body and history can take. In their distinct practices, the artists of Tracing Fragments appropriate a certain colonial visual memory as a way to reassemble potential histories and rewrite narratives of oppression and dispossession.

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Artists: Abdullah Qureshi, Frida Orupabo, Hugo Llanes, Inuuteq Storch, Kathy Clark and Sasha Huber.

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View the exhibition catalogue​

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Installation Photos by Vigfús Birgisson​

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