Hawapi: Out of Context
Exhibition
Exhibition
Authorship
Colectivo Agencia de Borde
Curatorship
Maxim Holland and Susie Quillinan
Type
Exhibition Group
Location
PS122 Gallery, Nueva York.USA
Date
September, 2023
The exhibition Out of Context opened at PS122 Gallery in New York as the closing chapter of that year’s Hawapi encuentro, gathering artists from across a decade of the project’s history to reflect on what it means to think and work outside one’s own territory. Agencia de Borde arrived at this encounter carrying the memory of an earlier one: in 2017 the collective had taken part in a Hawapi residency at the Triángulo Terrestre, the land triangle at the border between Chile and Peru, and returning now, in a different country and among artists from that same 2017 edition and others, felt like a continuation of a conversation begun years before, this time displaced onto foreign ground.
The piece created during the New York encounter carried forward a question the group had already worked through once, from the deserts and minefields of Atacama: what happens when you can’t trust the ground beneath your feet. In New York that question opened onto the present climate of uncertainty, no longer only physical ground but the invisible terrain of borders, paperwork, and permission. That uncertainty became lived experience rather than metaphor when one member of the group was denied a visa and could not travel. His absence was folded into the work itself, becoming part of what the piece was actually about: the impossibility of relying on ground that is supposed to be solid, whether it is sand, asphalt, or the promise of being allowed to cross a line on a map.
The encuentro ran from September 9 to 20, 2023, and the resulting exhibition remained on view at PS122 Gallery through October 22, 2023.
The piece created during the New York encounter carried forward a question the group had already worked through once, from the deserts and minefields of Atacama: what happens when you can’t trust the ground beneath your feet. In New York that question opened onto the present climate of uncertainty, no longer only physical ground but the invisible terrain of borders, paperwork, and permission. That uncertainty became lived experience rather than metaphor when one member of the group was denied a visa and could not travel. His absence was folded into the work itself, becoming part of what the piece was actually about: the impossibility of relying on ground that is supposed to be solid, whether it is sand, asphalt, or the promise of being allowed to cross a line on a map.
The encuentro ran from September 9 to 20, 2023, and the resulting exhibition remained on view at PS122 Gallery through October 22, 2023.
Linked projects
Publications
Residencies
Hawapi 2023, New York — «Out of Context» Arriving in New York with Hawapi meant returning to a question we had already grown in an earlier encuentro: what happens when you can’t trust the ground beneath your feet. That question, which we had previously worked through from the desert and its minefields, opened up again on entirely different terrain — a city foreign to our usual territories, where the ground was no longer sand or salt flat but asphalt, bureaucracy, invisible borders. And the question took on a form we hadn’t expected: one member of the group couldn’t travel because his visa was denied. His absence wasn’t an administrative detail but a shared experience for all of us: the ground that was supposed to be solid — the very possibility of crossing a border to think together — turned out to be exactly what we couldn’t rely on. Over eleven days we worked with that fracture as part of the encuentro itself, holding the collective conversation from within that absence too, understanding that being «out of context» wasn’t only a geographic or artistic condition, but something that could also be imposed from outside, without warning, on the bodies and trajectories of those trying to find one another.
New York, USA.
September, 2023