Beyond the Record: Muriel Hasbun, Stephanie Concepción Ramírez, Jessica Carolina González

Beyond the Record centers around the selection of three photographic series by the renowned Salvadoran artist and activist Muriel Hasbun (b. 1961): Pulse: New Cultural Registers (2020–22), X post facto (2009–2013), and Saints and Shadows (1991–2004), which provide a mini-survey of her career. Hasbun’s complex body of work is especially pertinent in the context of art historical reevaluation of photographic practices that surged in response to the US interventions in Central America in the 1980s, such as the recent exhibition Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities (Tufts University Galleries, 2022), in which she was included. Hasbun draws upon a diverse array of archives, including family albums, medical records from her father’s dental office, documents from her mother’s pioneering contemporary art gallery El Laberinto, and even a seismographic repository of El Salvador to meditate on the complex negotiations involved in the construction and preservation of personal and collective identities and memories. The work of Houston-based artists of Salvadoran descent Stephanie Concepción Ramírez (b. 1984) and Jessica Carolina González (b. 1995) extends Hasbun’s reflection by examining the effects of the conflict and trauma on the children of survivors and refugees, and their resonant political and psychological demands. In their work, all three women engage deeply with both personal and official archives (both in El Salvador and in the US) to address violent legacies of the Salvadoran civil war and its effects on Salvadoran communities both in their home country and abroad. They ask pertinent questions about loss, mourning, affective recovery, and rebuilding the communities that are often exiles or refugees. While doing so, they also ask pertinent questions about the common assumptions related to the indexical character of the photographic medium. In their work, a “record” reveals as much as it obscures, always superseded by imagination, desire, and affect.

Dorota Biczel, Ph.D.

About the Artists

Muriel Hasbun is an artist and educator born in El Salvador who works in multimedia and interactive installations, layering photography, text, scientific measurements, fabric, and objects to explore neglected histories of El Salvador and her personal narrative rooted in Palestinian Christian and French and Eastern European Jewish diasporas. Hasbun has earned numerous awards and honors, including a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholar grant. Hasbun earned an MFA in Photography at The George Washington University and an AB at Georgetown University. Hasbun’s work was exhibited in early 2021 in a one-person installation at RoFa Projects in Potomac, Maryland. Her work is held by many collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Stephanie Concepción Ramírez is a Salvadoran-American artist from Prince George’s County, Maryland. She currently lives and works on the traditional land of the Akokisa tribe. Concepción Ramírez obtained her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2017 and her BFA in Print and Photography from Old Dominion University in 2014. Her notable two-person shows include The Meaning Wavers with Betelhem Makonnen at Women and Their Work Gallery, Austin, TX and Preludes with Alicia Link for Partial Shade, A Platform/Co-Lab Project, Austin, TX, both in 2019. She was the artist in residence at Northwestern Oklahoma State University (2018), MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2019), and Acre, Steuben, WI (2019). She also participated in numerous group shows around the United States, most notably the Texas Biennial exhibition A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon in 2021.

Jessica Carolina González is an interdisciplinary contemporary artist and organizer from Houston, TX. In her work, González utilizes traditional archives and the archives of her bloodline as tools for storytelling and critique in a post-colonial landscape. As a product of the Central American diaspora, her lineage has been shaped by war, displacement, surveillance, grief, and spirituality. Through her artistic practice, she collapses timelines and narratives to complicate the American understanding of ever-present sociopolitical issues embedded within her work. She creates to preserve her narrative because her communities are often absent or misrepresented in the dominant visual culture. González’s work has been exhibited by the Law Warschaw Gallery in St. Paul, Minnesota, Remezcla’s “Tejas Made” art gallery, and Art League Houston. She has been an invited panelist for the art conference Latino Art Now! a Latino art symposium founded by the Inter-University Program for Latino Research and for “Art in the Space of Social and Political Advocacy” hosted by the Houston Coalition Against Hate. She was a finalist for the Houston Artadia Award, was awarded the first prize for the juried Latinx exhibition “Withstand” at the Holocaust Museum Houston, and is a recipient of the Idea Fund, funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation. González is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Questions

For questions about this exhibition, please contact André Ramos-Woodard, Exhibitions and Programs Coordinator, at andre@hcponline.org or 713-529-4755, ext. 16.

       Dates

• Exhibition on View ,Thursday, September 22 – Saturday, November 27, 2022

• Opening Reception, Thursday, September 22, 6pm–8pm

• Muriel Hasbun Exhibition Walkthrough, Wednesday, September 28, 6:30 pm–8:00 pm

• Jessica Carolina González’s Artist Talk, Thursday, October 13, 6:30 pm–8:00 pm

• Stephanie Concepción Ramírez, Artist Talk, Thursday, November 3, 6:30 pm–8:00 pm

• Curator and Artists Panel Discussion, Saturday, November 12, 2022, TBA