Borders of Freedom/Contornos de Libertad

ES / EN

Online Opening Event: 7 pm PST (8 pm CST), October 10, 2020
October 10 to December 15, 2020
Curated by Patricio Majano
Alexia Miranda, Sayre Quevedo, Guadalupe Maravilla, Fredy Solan, Crack Rodriguez, Abigail Reyes

Borders of Freedom is a video exhibition featuring artists living in El Salvador and its diaspora, whose work addresses the concept of freedom from different perspectives, connecting it with intimacy, spirituality, gender, migration and sociopolitical context. Collectively, the works address the theme of freedom and consider what the artists identify as constraints of freedom and ways in which to deal with these issues. The exhibition aims to centralize creative dialogue by artists located in El Salvador as well as across the United States.

Presented in Partnership with Y.ES Contemporary and in the upcoming LACE exhibition Intergalactics: Against Isolation. In collaboration with Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT) and La Facultad de Artes.

Borders of Freedom includes work from the Y.ES Contemporary Art Loan Program. Founded in February this year, the program makes 30 Salvadoran artist’s artworks, part of The Mario Cader-Frech Collection, available for loan internationally.

Image credit: Crack Rodríguez, La Trinidad (video still), 2016. Courtesy of Colección Mario Cader-Frech and artist.

Patricio Majano is a Salvadoran curator, artist and professor. He is the Curator and Interim Director of Y.ES Contemporary and a professor at the School of Arts of the University of El Salvador. Previously, he collaborated in the Educational Programs of the Museum of Art of El Salvador and the Forma Museum in San Salvador. He earned his BA from the University of El Salvador. His practice focuses in Salvadoran context and environment.

Abigail Reyes is a visual artist and poet. Reyes has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Art of El Salvador (MARTE); Poporopo Alternative Project, Guatemala City, Guatemala; Lokkus Contemporary Art Gallery, Medellin, Colombia; Extra Gallery, Guatemala City, Guatemala; Manzanita Hall Gallery California State University Northridge, USA, the Museum of Art and Design, San Jose, Costa Rica, among others.
She has participated in group exhibitions at the Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; Sies + Höke Gallery in Düsseldorf, Germany; the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France; TEOR/éTica in San José, Costa Rica; the Taimiao Art Gallery in Beijing, China; Städtisches Galerie Wolfsburg, Germany; Context Miami, USA; Cinema Tonalá, Bogota, Colombia; Alternative Project, Guatemala City, Guatemala; National Room, San Salvador, El Salvador; Lokkus Contemporary Art Gallery, Medellin, Colombia; Cultural Center of Spain, San Salvador, El Salvador. She lives and works in La Libertad, El Salvador.

Alexia Miranda studied Humanities, Contemporary Dance, Plastic Arts, Transpersonal Psychology and Psycho-corporeal Language. Her work has been exhibited at the MARTE Museum in El Salvador, MADC Museum in Costa Rica, MAM Museum in Santo Domingo 2008, Hard Core Contemporary Space, Miami, 2008. IV Central American Film and Video Exhibition II Ventana a Iberoamérica, Nicaragua 2011. Selected at the IV Inter-American Biennial of Video Art of the IDB in Washington 2008, Instituto Italo-Latino Americano, Rome 2009 and at the Santa Fe International Film Festival in Bogotá Colombia 2009, Performance DEFORMES International Biennial, Chile 2010, BAVIC Central American Biennial (2008 Honduras), (2012 Panama), (2016 Costa Rica), as well as the “Miami International Performance Festival” 2012 and the selection of EJECT International Video Performance Festival of Mexico City, Ex Teresa Arte Actual México DF. “Month Of Performance Art Berlin 2013” Gallery Meinblau, “MANIFEST” invited by the Hemispheric Institute of Policies and Performance of The Americas, Montreal, 2014. Selected in FUSO, Annual International Video Art of Lisboa 2017 and in “Pacific Standard Time”, Live Art LA / LA REDCAT, Los Angeles, U.S.A 2018. “PROJECTOR” Art Video Festival Madrid, 2018, XXI Biennial of Art Paiz “Más Allá” Guatemala, 2018 curated by Gerardo Mosquera.

Crack Rodríguez is an artivist, and a founding member of the artist production collective The Fire Theory as well as the movement/collective Los Siempre Sospechosos de Todo. Their practices together and separately are intrinsically related to the social, political and popular culture, and aim to build strong ties with the public where reaction and or participation become a large part of the work.
In 2014, Rodríguez was nominated for the MISOL Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. In 2015, he was a Fellow at the Paul Klee Summer Academy, curated by Hassan Khan, in Bern Switzerland. In 2016, he was selected for the DESPINA Art and Activism in Latin America artist residency in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and in 2017, he participated in Open Source Project Art Residence in Brooklyn, USA, as part of The Fire Theory collective.
Rodriguez participated in Landings, curated by Joan Duran, in Merida, the Yucatan/Belize, supporting Rodríguez development in critical and political thinking. In 2017, he spoke at the Creative Time Summit, titled Homeland and Revolution, in Toronto, Canada. Currently, he lives and works in La Libertad, El Salvador.

Fredy Solan started his career in 2006 as a graffiti artist. His current practice is dedicated to the production of site-specific installations and actions within public spaces.
Solan had a solo exhibition Before and After at the Cultural Center of Spain; participated with the work Fusilamiento at the Eclectic Festival of the Arts (FEA); and Graffiti is Nothing at the Festival of Interventions in Public Spaces (ADAPTE), all in San Salvador, El Salvador. In 2015 Solano showed From the tangible to the intangible at VOLUMES in Zürich, Switzerland; and Tropical Taboo, a collective exhibition at Benedictine University, Lisle, USA. He has also been a recipient of the RAPACES residency in Carazo, Nicaragua, and participated in the 2016 X Central American Biennial.
Solano was featured in the 2015 article Salvador: Silent Spring by Luisa Fuentes Guaza; Art adventures with El Museo del Barrio: El Salvador by Rocío Aranda; and in Sites and Citations published by the Cisneros Foundation.

Guadalupe Maravilla is an artist who is formerly known as Irvin Morazán. He adopted his undocumented father’s fake last name, Maravilla, to show solidarity, and as an expression of political empathy. Maravilla utilizes performance, sculpture, and video to explore fictional and autobiographical rituals sparked by current events.
Maravilla’s work has been recognized with numerous awards and fellowships including: Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship 2019; Soros Fellowship: Art Migration and Public Space 2019; Map Fund Grant 2019; Creative Capital Grant; Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant; Art Matters Grant; VMFA 2017; VCU Fountainhead Fellowship; Dedalus Foundation Fellowship; Cisneros Foundation Travel Grant; and The Robert Mapplethorpe Award for Photography. He has participated in residencies at the LMCC Workspace, SOMA in Mexico City, Mexico, and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, USA.
Maravilla’s performances have been featured New York institutions, The Whitney Museum, The New Museum. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum, El Museo Del Barrio and the Jersey City Museum. He has also shown at the Masur Museum of Art in Louisiana, USA, the Caribbean Museum in Colombia, the Museum of Art El Salvador (MARTE) in El Salvador, the Mercosur Biennial in Brazil, the X Central America Biennial in Costa Rica, the XI Nicaragua Biennial in Nicaragua, Performa 11, Performa 13, Saud Haus in Berlin, Vooruit in Belgium, and more. Currently, he works as an Assistant Professor of Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, USA.

Sayre Quevedo is an artist and journalist. He works across mediums to tell stories about intimacy, identity, and human relationships. In 2018 his piece Espera received the Third Coast/RHDF Directors’ Choice Award and his other piece The Quevedos was nominated for a Best Audio Documentary award by the International Documentary Association (IDA). The following year he won the 2019 Third Coast/RHDF Gold Award for Best Documentary for The Return. The piece was also nominated for a Best Audio Documentary award by the IDA — Quevedo’s second nomination, two years in a row. He was the Fall 2019 Podcaster-In-Residence for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and currently works for VICE News.