Through Sun 6/5
Seoul-born Korean-American artist Aram Han Sifuentes says, “I was devastated by the elections (2016), as many were. I needed a platform to shout. So immediately after the elections, I started to make protest banners in my apartment. Banners are a way for me to resist what is happening in the United States and the world. It is a way to put my voice out there and not stay silent.”
Six of her large-scale red banners are now flying at moCa Cleveland’s Gund Commons, as Messages to Authorities (Go Away!) (2021), part of its program to engage visitors and viewers in a conversation about community, culture and immigration. They’re based on Red Cards created by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center that outline the rights and protections held by all people under the U.S. Constitution, regardless of immigration status.
The banners are part of Han Sifuentes’ exhibit called Who Was This Built to Protect? that grew out of her artist residency at moCa which looks at “U.S. governmental practices, highlights roadblocks on the path to citizenship, and encourages moCa’s audiences to question bureaucratic systems, those who construct them, and who they benefit,” and encourages people to ask “How can we humanize systems of civic engagement & belonging?”
Han Sifuentes is the daughter of a seamstress and she learned to sew as a child, a skill she bring to her textile-based work through which she use “to investigate identity politics, immigration, immigrant labor, possession, and dispossession, citizenship and belonging, dissent and protest, and race politics in the United States.”
She says, “As a non-citizen and a new mother, I cannot always go to protests. I realized that many people needed to find a way to participate, resist, and speak up but also couldn’t always go to protests because they too were mothers, non-citizens, undocumented — those who would be at great risk if caught up and arrested. My protest banner-making workshops have become a place where people come together in solidarity through making and making is, in and of itself, a form of resistance.”
Her show will be on view through Sunday June 5.
mocacleveland.org/exhibitions/aram-han-sifuentes-who-was-built-protect