Re Imagining the City from the Edges: Border Symbiosis — 6th Edition
© Photo Credits: David Peinado
Anti Limites: Exhibition as part of the conference Re Imagining the City from the Edges: Border Symbiosis
Conference, presentations, workshops and multidisciplinary exhibition
6th edition - June 1 to 8, 2024 - Opening on June 1st, from 5 to 7 PM
Open walls as possible cracks or apertures of life, death, resistance and hope. Gaps to be filled with dreams, from the personal to the political, from the individual to the collective. Against or in spite of the horrible.
Re Imagining the City from the Edges: Border Symbiosis is a multidisciplinary conference and exhibition that brings together different perspectives on the concepts of city and border based on artistic, cultural and social interventions and dialogues with people from a variety of cultural and social sectors. The primary objective is to re-think or re-imagine urban, artistic, cultural, border, inter- and cross-border dynamics through the collaboration of artists, activists, researchers, students, civil and collective associations.
For any questions or requests concerning accessibility to the event or our gallery space, please contact James via email or by phone at 514-842-9686.
For general accessibility information, please visit our dedicated page. Please note that with the increase in COVID 19 and flu transmissions, masks must be worn for the duration of the events
The SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art is pleased to participate in this hybrid event “Re Imagining the City from the Edges: Border Symbiosis” with the artist-run center Articule.
Isabel Cabanillas de la Torre was born on May 5, 1993 in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. She was always an empathetic and loving young woman with her community and the people around her. She had a son whom she cared for and loved deeply. She loved plants, biking, dancing, singing (she had a very beautiful voice), but what brought her great joy was painting. She was an artist who painted many images on clothing. She also carried out political and feminist activities, such as organizing collections to help migrants and campaigning for the defense of women's rights. In the early morning of January 18, 2020, she was murdered on Inocente Ochoa and Francisco I. Madero streets in downtown Ciudad Juárez. Although her mother, her family, her friends and feminist groups have continuously demanded justice, the Specialized Gender Prosecutor's Office has proceeded with negligence in her case and has not found the culprits of her femicide.
Justice for Isabel Cabanillas de la Torre!
Alexandra (Alukandra) Coronado (Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua). Multidisciplinary artist, active collaborator in projects aimed at children and adults. She has participated in exhibitions, conferences and international events in person and virtually. She explores and experiments with collage, design, poetry and photography, which she promotes as a tool for expression, well-being and personal growth. She was founder of “Fotoetc” (2015-2023), a project in which she diffused subjects through photography, linking it with other disciplines. Her photographic work is closely related to self-introspection, the transience of time and the beauty of the everyday. Since 2023 he has been doing conscious photowalks, with the aim of merging the practice of active meditation and contemplative photography.
Brenda Isela Ceniceros Ortiz (BICO) is an architect and visual artist by training, with a PhD in architecture. Her lines of research are multidisciplinary in areas that integrate architecture, urbanism and art. Her research is rooted in the study of the border city as a setting, in conjunction with the social actions and problems of citizens in this global era. She operates as a cultural manager and visual artist through the collective Bazart Juárez. Part of her projects and work has been exhibited and recognized in Mexico, United States and Spain. She is a teacher and researcher at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, Department of Architecture.
Cesario Tarín focuses his gaze on the intersections that occur between Art and Human Rights. He studied visual arts and is also a lawyer, has a master's degree in studies and creative processes in art and design, was a professor in the Art Department of the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez and professor at the Centro Municipal de las Artes, and has carried out curatorial activities at the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, among other spaces. In his career, he has collaborated with civil society organizations working in the defense and promotion of human rights, the right to the city, and has been a representative of victims before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
Christine Brault lives in Montreal. An interdisciplinary artist, her work is mainly created in situ through poetic, artivistic and feminist performance art. Her research deals with issues of migration, borders, human rights, gender violence and violence against the land. For several years now she has been building North-South bridges in the Americas. With a regular presence in various Latin American countries, she works mainly in Mexico, using performance art and artistic workshops as a pretext for provoking dialogues and conversations on these issues. She is a doctoral candidate in Arts Studies and Practices at UQAM.
Cinthia Alondra Mena (Mena Sáenz) lives in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. A multidisciplinary contemporary post-war artist, she works with narratives of individual and collective aesthetic resistance to social configurations, the performative strategies agents adopt to survive in imaginaries and their discourses. She challenges hegemonic dynamics through powerful everyday images with the goal of generating dialogue and reflection on the violence that permeates our lives. Her work is based on the fragmentation of contexts and imagined social situations, and an in-depth analysis of the subject and its environment.
David Peinado Romero, a photographer based in Ciudad Juarez, is dedicated to capturing the journey of migrants with an insightful and empathetic eye. Through his images, he reflects the harsh reality and challenges faced by those who cross borders in search of opportunities. His work not only documents these experiences, but also seeks to generate awareness and empathy for the stories of those who seek a better future. With each photograph, Peinado Romero invites us to reflect on the complexities of migration and to recognize the shared humanity that unites us all.
Israel Gómez Mares (Chihuahua) is a sculptor and ceramist who graduated from the Centro Municipal de las Artes in 2010. He has exhibited at the Museo de Arqueología del Chamizal and at the CMA gallery. Since 2012, he has directed the cultural space and workshop Cerámica Corporeichon. In 2018, she won the National Ceramics Award. She has studied a degree in Visual Arts at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez. In December 2024, Azul Arena will present his latest works in a solo exhibition.
Itzel Aguilera (Chihuahua) has been a photographer for 30 years. She has lived and worked in Ciudad Juárez since 2008. Mother, activist, cultural manager, curator, reading mediator and independent teacher, she collaborates with collectives, educational and cultural institutions. Since January 2023, she has formed her permanent analog photography workshop Volver al centro (back to the center). Since January 2024, she has been coordinating the cultural space Miciela studio, which houses a library, an analog photography laboratory and a collaborative space for various creative activities around visual arts, literature, theater and performance, among others. She currently coordinates exhibitions and special activities at the Ciudad Juárez Art Museum.
Jorge Yorch Pérez (Ciudad Juárez) is a sculptor, muralist and baker. He is a founding member of the binational art collective Collectif Rezizte, active in the border zone since 2003. Yorch sees his identity as linked to binational life. His most important pieces include El Monumento Ser Fronterizo, a painted bus sculpture located near the Zaragoza bridge, and the new Pie Migrante, made from rods used for construction, but which migrants use as passages to climb the wall, to cross the Mexico-US border. The bars that make up the work seem imbued with death, despair and sadness, but also with success.
Luis Pegut was born in the last millennium in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. He is a full-time documentary photographer, activist and cultural organizer in the creative industry, publishing and visual arts. He has been working professionally in artistic, journalistic, documentary and scenic photography for over 25 years. His name appears on the New York Public Library's International Register of Photographers, one of the world's most important. In 2022, The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University published his photographic work Vlu el ángel azul in its annual School Journal of Hispanic Policy.
Luis Roacho Aguilera (Ciudad Juárez) is a visual artist, primarily a painter. In 2016, he obtained a bachelor's degree in visual arts from the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez. He is interested in themes related to the border condition and the experience of living in this city, including violence, memory and vulnerability. His work explores the iconography of violence in the city, showing how certain everyday objects and landscapes are laden with memories of crimes or tragic events to create portraits that capture the human fragility present on the city's margins.
Mara Cardona Walls was born in Veracruz, Veracruz. They studied at the Centro Universitario de Teatro at UNAM, the Círculo de Fábrica de Artes y Oficios Aragón in Mexico City, and at the Sculpture workshop of the Instituto Zacatecano de Cultura Ramon López Velarde. Their practice is developed where the physical or material object is more important than its conceptualization or idea. In their work, objects and materials from everyday life can be seen, conserving their intrinsic associations, but appearing decontextualized. Their mediums are installation, sculpture, video, audio and photography. They have exhibited and intervened in spaces in Mexico City, Zacatecas, Ciudad Juárez.
Mariana Elisa Maese (Ciudad Juárez) is a Mexican visual artist. She obtained a degree in Visual Arts at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez. Her artistic production develops from personal and sensory practices, evolving towards a bodily somatization. Her work deals with themes such as life and death, the decomposition and organic processes of the body, and the construction of identity in environments of violence and precariousness, according to reflections that she is currently materializing in actions, performance and drawing. She is interested in generating a poetic aesthetic to represent death impulses and their sources.
Olga Guerra (Mexico). Her work has explored the testimony of people who have lived through situations of violence to highlight the importance of her own and collective wounds. She lived in Uruguay for eight years and from her condition as a migrant she inhabited the notion of limit, to cross borders from the graphic image. She is currently researching materials that enhance the production of life. Her production is constituted by organic elements, mainly from the vegetable world such as thorns, fibers, charcoal and vegetable pigments, metal tips and paper or recycled materials, with this she produces installations with organic and perishable objects.
Tomás Contreras (Ciudad Juárez). Professor in the Art Department of the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez. His work concentrates on the investigation of contemporary Mexican contexts, focusing mainly on drug violence, femicide and migration, in relation to their direct and indirect impact on vulnerable groups and specific territories. The construction of his art objects recuperates processes of manual elaboration, using masonry, blacksmithing and carpentry. He is currently exploring video without linear narration, audio design and false documentation, as well as the composition of concrete music.