Other Ways of Being Together

The artists in this exhibition offer different ways of thinking about what it means to be together. Their works begin with specific materials, places and lived experiences, but also with the relationships that surround them: between generations, within communities, through acts of care and labour, or in the memories held by objects and images.

Rosa Elena Curruchich paints the social life of her Kaqchikel Maya community with extraordinary attention, depicting gatherings, ceremonies, work and everyday encounters. In her paintings, community is not an abstract idea but something made visible through the many ways people occupy a place together.

Hellen Ascoli draws from her exchanges with Central American youth held in detention centers in the United States, where she serves as an interpreter. In Interpreting Ana, language, translation and listening come into direct relation with experiences of migration and separation, considering the forms of connection that can emerge through the act of interpreting between people and across institutional structures.

Amparo de la Sota begins with found cloths and blankets that already carry traces of use and previous lives. Through precise and intricate embroidery, she adds patterns and images to their surfaces, allowing different histories and gestures to coexist within the same material.

In Akira Ikezoe’s paintings — objects, figures and forms from seemingly distant contexts come to inhabit the same system. Their relationships gradually reveal an internal logic, where each element becomes necessary to the others and indispensable to the whole.

Elisabeth Wild brings disparate fragments into relation. In her small-scale collages, images drawn from fashion, architecture, art and everyday visual culture are removed from their original contexts and intuitively recombined. Familiar fragments become strange architectures, objects and spaces, forming compact worlds in which unexpected relationships can take shape.

Abbas Zahedi interrogates the bureaucratic systems——administrative, religious, institutional, extractive, and militaristic——that organize collective life. In EX/IT, a sculpture made from a salvaged foghorn and gas-powered exit sign, a short, sharp alarm signals an alert to others in the gallery. The work turns sound into a collective call, asking how those sharing a space might become aware of one another and of the systems that shape their actions.

For Silät and Claudia Alarcón, these relationships are embedded in a collective practice that brings together more than one hundred Wichí women weavers from their community. Weaving is both a highly developed material language and a structure for working collectively, sustaining and transforming knowledge while connecting the weavers to one another, to the stars and to the world around them.

Rodolfo Abularach turns the gaze inward. In his iconic paintings of the eye, his masterful handling of light and vision becomes a means of exploring an interior, spiritual space. Yet looking inward is not necessarily a solitary act: the search within can open onto something greater than the individual, a collective spiritual consciousness through which we might understand ourselves as part of a larger whole.

Across these different practices, being together is understood less as an ideal than as something we continually make, negotiate and seek out. It can take the form of gathering, working alongside one another, translating someone’s words, passing on a technique, responding to a signal, looking inward, or bringing seemingly distant things into relation. Together, the works consider connection at different scales—from the intimate encounter between individuals to the communities, systems and shared realms that extend beyond them. They ask how individual parts might come into relation with something larger, without losing their distinctness within the whole.