Muriel Hasbun: A celebration of Citizenship
361 Main Street, Kentlands, Gaithersburg, Maryland, 20878 USA
Sep 17 -Nov 20, 2023
The exhibition celebrates Muriel Hasbun’s continuing life of citizenship and dedication to delving into the themes of identity and memory, transcending her personal experience to connect with the collective history of humanity, the experience of many of us, regardless of nationality or region of the world.
Descended from Salvadoran and Palestinian Christians on her paternal side and Polish and French Jews on her maternal side, Hasbun grew up in El Salvador, which she had to leave at the beginning of the Salvadoran Civil War in 1979.
A Celebration of Ctizenship presents a small selection of work by Hasbun, an artist who immerses us in the condition and feeling of belonging in the world.
Hasbun's photographic work is not a symphony paralyzed by the click of the camera, her work is a becoming, a process that comes together solidly and courageously in each of her stories.
Her focus on identity and territory highlights the importance of belonging to a larger community and an understanding of how our individual identities are intertwined with the history and culture of the society in which we live.
Her Arab, Jewish and Latino origins were transformed into Santos y sombras / Saints and Shadows (1990–97), a series in which Hasbun superimposed negatives of archival family documents and new images to discover her origins, and learn about her family and their exiles, as well as the different common histories of migration and genocide.
In Protegida /Watched Over and Auvergne-Toi et Moi, a search is observed to make visible a family that, given the persecution of the Jews and the prejudice towards the Arabs, was forced to become invisible.
Lastly, a selection from her most recent series, Pulse: New Cultural Registers / Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales (2020–ongoing), overlays the history of art in El Salvador combined with seismic records and the undeniable presence of her mother in the Central American artistic sphere as in her personal history.
The exploration of territory and the actualization of life and citizenship constitute for Hasbun an investigation without barriers in a continued process of becoming, and today, we celebrate her successful career. Her photography imagines a future by showing us the past and what is no longer physically present, creating a link with an event that is now recorded forever, in spite of it often being silenced in history.
Hasbun's story and that of many is alive through her photography. Her work is present and will forever be a celebration of identity, an ode to human diversity, and a call for inclusion and understanding.
Thank you Muriel for this celebration of a life in freedom!
Gabriela Rosso