Art Basel: Exhibition Blurred Borders of Carola Bravo

An immigration and human migration themed art exhibition titled “Blurred Borders” that connects vividly with themes troubling our world now. It will be featured during Art Basel week in Miami in early December, and was created by Venezuelan-born video-artist Carola Bravo.

 

MIAMI [ ABN NEWS ] — “Blurred Borders” is based on the artist’s own personal stories about her migration and immigration to the U.S., and also takes on universal themes, symbols and concepts that strike a chord with today’s concerns.

She has lived in the U.S. for the past four years. Her exhibition opens November 21, is on view through Art Basel week at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum FIU, and will remain on view through February 28 – frost.fiu.edu/exhibitions/2015/carola-bravo.html

This is Carola Bravo’s American museum debut, her first solo show at a museum in the United States.

Opens November 21, 2015 and through Art Basel week, on view through February 28, 2016.

Summary of the Exhibition “Blurred Borders”

If history tells us anything, it’s that cultures and populations are not static. Societies shift and populations move, driven by war, poverty or persecution, and pulled by opportunity and hope.

Migration and immigration are emblematic of the American condition.

 

 

African Americans moved from the rural South to more industrial areas of the North in what became known as the Great Migration. Likewise, hundreds of thousands of European immigrants crossed the ocean, often fleeing political or religious persecution in their homelands. Thousands throughout Latin America and the Caribbean have journeyed north in search of better lives.

This theme of change, exile, assimilation (and more specifically hope), forms the core of Carola Bravo’s new series of video works, which are inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series (1940–41).

 

 

In the exhibition “Blurred Borders,” Venezuelan-born Bravo, known for her immersive site-specific installations and videos that address space, time and shifting territories, mines her personal history for inspiration.

Depictions of migratory birds, yellow butterflies, weathered suitcases and white doves evoke political, psychological, poetic, and pragmatic manifestations of the contemporary migrant experience.

 

 

Quotes from the Artist:

“My exhibition features my personal experiences as an immigrant, plus my studies of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series.”

“My own personal migratory experience is related alongside memories of my birth city, Caracas and visual imagery, symbols and concepts borrowed from literature and art history.”

“These include imagery of quilts by African American women who lived in Gee’s Bend, Indiana; yellow butterflies visualized as symbols of hope (from the book A Hundred Years of Solitude); maps and other concepts from texts by Jorge Luis Borgas; migratory butterflies from the Amazon that drink turtle’s tears; old suitcases filled with memories, and white doves (as symbols of peace).”