Collective “Unspoken Identities” brings Puerto Rican art to Barcelona

One of the powers of art is to portray reality and truth. Thanks to him, discussions, protests and conversations on issues that concern us are held without the need to emit sound. Culture, especially the plastic arts, speak, converse and shout the truth, many times in silence.

In the world that we live in today, so polarized, to speak of plurality is to walk with the wind of truth hitting you head on. The exhibition, “Unspoken Identities”, promoted by the gallery owner Ana Mas Salsespeaks, from diversity, of that ambiguity that invades our reality as Puerto Ricans no matter where we live.

Nine artists, using the common language of art, portray Puerto Ricanness from their position, style, and vision in this sample that will be presented from February 16 in Barcelona. To engage in this dialogue, the gallery owner Ana Mas Salse has commissioned the artist and curator Abdiel Segarra to exhibit the work of Ana Mas Projects Osvaldo Budet, Ivelisse Jiménez, Nora Maité Nieves, Glendalys Medina, Melissa Raymond & René Sandín, Javier Orfón, Ángel Otero, Awilda Sterling and Omar Velázquez.

“’Unspoken Identities’ is plurality. It is to show part of that high-level artistic production of Puerto Ricans living here or outside the archipelago to a European audience. It is exposing that work so that it is known in Spain, but above all to a European audience”, comments Ana, born and raised in Barcelona, ​​but living on the island for five years.

Since she arrived in Puerto Rico, Ana Mas Salse, director of the Ana Mas Projects gallery, began to swarm and connect with key people that allowed her to delve into current artistic production. She identified the themes that infiltrated their work and began, already as a resident of the Island, to distinguish what disturbed the population. From that moment on, she kept managing the programming of her gallery in Barcelona from here with an eye on the fact that at some point she wanted her public to know the complexity of these topics.

“Since I moved, shortly before Hurricane Maria, I came into contact with contemporary art. I knew what was being done at an artistic level, but little by little I was connecting and getting to know the environment better”.

That interest and the visibility that Puerto Rican art and its diasporas have acquired thanks to the work of curators such as Carla Acevedo-Yates, Marcela Guerrero, and Marina Reyes Franco were the driving force behind “Unspoken Identities.”

“I think that these curators and in particular the exhibition ‘There is no post-hurricane world: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria’, curated by Marcela Guerrero at the Whitney Museum of American Art, have made us stop looking at the art of the Caribbean, Puerto Rico and the diaspora. It is from this look that the intention of this ambitious project is born. “Unspoken Identities” is a reflection of today’s world and how each of these nine artists deal with the issue of identity.”

With this exhibition, both Ana and the curator will validate and assume the ambiguity that inevitably characterizes us, enriches us, and is an essential feature of our personality, as a reflection of the colonial veil that covers us. The nine exhibiting artists develop the theme in a diversity of media and proposals.

Paraphrasing and quoting the words of the curator in the exhibition catalogue: Omar Velázquez and Javier Orfón fix their gaze on the ancestral past, the popular imagination and the landscape. “On the other hand, Osvaldo Budet Meléndez and the duo Melissa Raymond and René Sardín review research on limits and the contradictions camouflaged in the progressive agenda that has shaped the Puerto Rican cultural and political present.” In the case of Ivelisse Jiménez and Awilda Sterling, both “challenge the conventions that the Western gaze imposes on art from the Global South.” The diaspora represented by Glendalys Medina, Nora Maité Nieves and Ángel Otero “explore the value of ornament in the identification processes mediated by the migratory experience.”

“Abdiel was perfect for the project. I like to give voice to curators who are capable of narrating that discourse, not from homogeneity but with plural voices and plural techniques and who fly over that complexity”, says Ana.

Details:

“Unspoken Identities”

It opens on February 16 and runs until March 31, 2023.

In it, the work of the artists Osvaldo Budet, Ivelisse Jiménez, Nora Maité Nieves, Glendalys Medina, Melissa Raymond & René Sandín, Javier Orfón, Ángel Otero, Awilda Sterling and Omar Velázquez is presented.

The Ana Mas Projects gallery is located at Isaac Peral 7, 08902, l ́Hospitalet, Barcelona.

More information writing to [email protected]