Artists

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Anas Albraehe, Guadalupe Maravilla, Nohemí Pérez

Press release

At its core, exodus is a paradox. It embodies both loss and reinvention, vulnerability and resistance. This act of movement outward is not just about escape, it signifies the abandonment of former states of being and the reconfiguration of space and identity. To embark on an exodus is to leave behind systems of control, borders, frameworks of governance—and to move toward a space of possibility. In Necropolitics (2019), Cameroonian historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe argues that “borders are no longer merely lines separating nation-states. They are mobile, ubiquitous, and function as a sorting mechanism for global mobility.” These invisible lines not only separate, they are forces that shape our world and the bodies that inhabit it.

The works of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Anas Albraehe, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Nohemí Pérez explore the shifting nature of borders, not just as geopolitical lines but as mechanisms of exclusion and control. Each artist confronts the violence and trauma of displacement while also revealing the resilience and transformation born from these experiences.

The exhibition opens with 45th Parallel, a video installation by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, set in the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, a unique municipal site that straddles the border between Canada and the US. Built as a five-part monologue, the work centres on the fatal shooting of an unarmed Mexican teenager by a U.S. Border Patrol agent, to reflect on what defines a frontier and the physical limits of a state’s jurisdiction. The artist connects this judicial case to broader systems of militarization, drawing parallels between drone warfare controlled by soldiers behind a screen thousands of km away from their victims. Highlighting how borders are richly layered spaces, the film and the hand-painted theatrical backdrops remind us how free movement, free knowledge and free space are constantly under threat.

Anas Albraehe brings a more poetic vision based on his own experience of migration from Syria to Lebanon in 2015. His portraits of sleeping migrants caught between exhaustion and dreams of elsewhere create a space where time slows and evasion is possible. The human figures merge with abstract landscapes, existing in a state of temporary and territorial rest. Here, the notion of belonging is suspended. Albraehe’s work brings out the vulnerability of those caught in limbo, but also their capacity to yearn for a new future beyond borders.

Albraehe’s work dialogues with Guadalupe Maravilla’s La alegría del fuego, a sculptural altar infused with his personal history. As a former undocumented migrant and cancer survivor, Maravilla creates work that transforms trauma into a tool for healing. His Disease Throwers series combines objects from his own migration route, along with medicinal elements and sound instruments, to create spaces for collective care. Accompanied by volcanic rock sculptures of backpacks, Maravilla’s altar becomes an active site of renewal and healing, where past suffering is acknowledged but reframed as a source of strength.

Nohemí Pérez returns our focus to the land. Her large-scale charcoal drawings and embroidered textiles evoke the scars left on regions where war, industry, and migration have reshaped both territory and lives. In her Nobody’s Land series, created during a residency in Texas, Pérez confronts the U.S.-Mexico border as another contested space. Families in transit, children in limbo—her haunting depictions speak of vulnerability, but also of the enduring presence of those left out of official narratives.

The land holds memory; it does not forget. It bears witness to exodus and forced migrations; to those who have passed through, those who have vanished, and those who resist disappearance.