In her three-part exhibition project The Visible, the Laughable, and the Invisible, Afro-Colombian artist Carmenza Banguera explores tropes of blackness and belonging, conjoining perspectives across two multicultural democracies, Colombia and the United States. Banguera’s works are partly based on observations drawn from an exploratory trip to Chicago in the spring of 2019 and reviewed through the lens of the Afro-Colombian experience in her hometown of Cali. Informed by the “racial reckoning” taking place in the United States following the murder of George Floyd, the exhibition offers a compelling meditation on the transnational meanings of the “resistant” black body as invulnerable and thus capable of arduous and unsafe work. Banguera offers a striking critique of this gendered and racialized notion of bodily resistance, baring the contradictions of such embodied citizenship as they subtend black Americans’ daily dealings with pervasive state violence and constrained labor markets. Conceived in close collaboration with the Contours of Black Citizenship in a Global Context research project at the Neubauer Collegium, this exhibition compels us to imagine new ways of being and seeing.

Curated by the Contours of Black Citizenship in a Global Context research team in collaboration with Dieter Roelstraete.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Carmenza Banguera is a visual artist based in Santiago de Cali, Colombia. She received a Masters in Plastic Arts from the Departmental Institute of Fine Arts in Cali. Her works have been included in various forums, such as the 45th Salón Nacional de Artistas and independent exhibitions in the United Arab Emirates, Argentina, Ecuador, and Colombia. Her primary subject of exploration is Afro-Colombian and Afro-Latino identity, specifically approached from concepts like cliché, ethnicity, race, racism, and taboos such as resentment, paranoia, and victimization—phenomena of a social and historical nature. Banguera constructs her work from the observation of contexts and their contemporary behavior, thus abstracting the forms through which identity is assumed and showing how ethnic-social recognition crosses the borders of the merely cultural. Banguera uses multiple formal means to create her artworks. In recent years, her work has been characterized by the use of techniques such as sculpture, drawing, installation, and ready-mades, among others. Banguera is collaborating on the Contours of Black Citizenship in a Global Context research project as a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow.