Muriel Hasbun, still from Scheherazade or (Per)forming the Archive.
Y.ES Contemporary presents Entangled/Entretejidos, a series of seven videos that addresses the different ways in which artists link to their identity as Salvadorans. The notions that exist around this identity are complex, as they are derived from various sources, including the heritage of indigenous peoples, a colonial past, a civil war, and mass migration.
Muriel Hasbun’s work is a fitting introduction to the discussion of identities. Her piece Scheherazade or (Per)forming the Archive is an autobiographical meditation that, through the artist’s family archive, addresses and resists transgenerational trauma, silence, and oblivion. Her family is of Salvadoran/Palestinian Christian and Polish/French Jewish descent; therefore, her story allows us to recognize the complexity and nuances to consider when talking about Salvadoran identity.
Muriel Hasbun, still from Scheherazade or (Per)forming the Archive.
The works of Melissa Guevara and Víctor Artiga have in common the reflection they generate about their beings and their identities using materials considered traditional of El Salvador, which are usually considered exotic. Guevara utilizes soil and Artiga corn dough. Through their bodies, they interact with these materials, and by extension with their stories. In this way, they link the past of the region with their present and their own experiences.
In Lucy Tomasino's work, Skin and Scar, the artist reflects on the marks, both on the earth and on the skin of people, creating links between personal stories and the history of a nation. The tension between the bodies alludes conflict, and water as a purifying element establishes a relationship with healing: we recognize in the scars marks of the past.
Lucy Tomasino, still from Skin and Scar
Gabriela Novoa, still from Drawing desire
Gabriela Novoa's work addresses gender and sexuality from the Salvadoran context, where many people, especially women, commonly suffer from gender violence. Novoa presents a hybrid documentary whose script was generated from testimonies of six women who talk about experiences of abuse, repression, guilt, and shame. Novoa presents a look at the experience of these women, while generating dialogues about female pleasure and sexuality, topics that are generally taboo in conservative societies such as in El Salvador.
Like Novoa, artist Kevin Baltazar addresses situations of social injustice to talk about identity. Baltazar presents a video performance in which, making use of his head covered with a rag moistened in chlorine, he performs the vain action of trying to clean the debris of an abandoned building. This gesture of trying to clean up something abandoned alludes discrimination due to socioeconomic status of people, who are regarded as unwanted. Novoa and Baltazar take political stances to protest about harmful aspects of the Salvadoran reality that permeate the identity.
Kevin Baltazar, still from Cleaning Methods
Natalia Dominguez, still from Did I Know I Came Back
The exhibition concludes with the work of Natalia Domínguez. While in the previous works different perspectives on Salvadoran identity are enunciated, in Natalia's piece predominates the non-definition of an identity: an individual is presented giving their back to the viewer, thus hiding their identity, in a way that could be anyone, anywhere. The piece focuses on this unstable path backwards, on the action of returning, a return to and from nowhere.
