SHIFT @ HCJM: “Climate Migrations: Displacements, Travel, Home”, exhibition at the POST

My new multi-media installation, SHIFT, is included in the exhibition “Climate Migrations: Displacements, Travel, Home”, curated by the Houston Climate Justice Museum. This exhibition is on view at the POST starting September 28, 2023 till April 30, 2024. Programming TBA.

SHIFT, contrasts videos of bayou nature with a compendium of rhetorical expressions regarding non-human species. 

SHIFT also alludes to the contradictory similes’ and the conflation of lexicons that shape and define the human versus non-human species migration. On one hand is our predisposition to use language in order to de-humanize our fellow species, while the other is the affinity to personify the natural world with human qualities.

Questions remain whether new universal frameworks can guide our aspirations for all of earth’s inhabitants to have the right to flourish, fulfill life’s potential and exist in dignity with other species.

SHIFT underscores the anthropomorphic lens and vernacular, while it identifies metaphoric parallels between discoveries in the microscopic world and with our contemporary notions of eco-system transformations.

(photos of installation in progress below - details of completed work coming soon)

“Climate Migrations” is a public art and public history project designed around the subject of climate change fueled migration, designed to connect artists, scholars, activists, and communities to explore/interrogate/imagine/expose the connection between climate change and displacement, travel, and making new homes.

‍The rotating and multi-site exhibit will look at the intersections of ecological disaster and migration in both the human and more-than-human worlds. It asks: what kinds of relationships and coordinations, temporal and otherwise, are disrupted in climate migrations? What are those projects that create displacement and, conversely, what kinds of new landscape relations are formed through displaced groups in new homes? What kinds of interdisciplinary experience and skills can help tell the stories of climate migration, like that of Gulf Coast mangrove forests moving north? As the climate crisis accelerates, climate shocks and cascading changes trigger the unprecedented displacement of human and more-than-human populations. Commonly used figures predict 200 million climate refugees by mid-century, approximately ten times the number of people displaced by environmental disaster per year currently. As countries throughout the world grapple with migratory crises today, skepticism around their ability to equitably mitigate the expected change in the future permeates. 

‍”Climate Migrations” also seeks to explore these processes of displacement and travel within Houston. As a site of dense historic and contemporary migration and exchange, what do climate migrations look like in Houston? Can dominant visions, stories, and histories of Houston be remade through stories of migration and transition? Houston has long been a center of transition; its edges, spaces, patches, and people have shifted and continue to shift. The context of climate migration begs the question: Is Houston a city in Texas, or something else entirely? We imagine it as a convergence zone with a tangled and frayed history; a confluence of colonization, land rights, war, water, ecological precarity, histories of museums, state policy, and fossil capitalism.

‍Artists and Contributors: Mashal Awais, Lina Dib, Valentina Jager, Naomi Kuo, Julia Barbosa Landois, Cin-Ty Lee, Reynier Leyva Novo, Henry G. Sanchez, Saúl Hernandez Vargas

Co-organized with Erika Mei Chua Holum, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Assistant Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum. Programming TBA.

Exhibit Hours at POST Houston, 401 Franklin St., X-Atrium gallery

parking information

‍Mon: Closed

Tue: Closed

Wed: 11:00 am-9:00 pm

Thu: 11:00 am-6:00 pm

Fri: 11:00 am-6:00 pm

Sat: 11:00 am-6:00 pm

Sun: 11:00 am-4:00 pm

Support for this exhibit has been made possible in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance. Additional support from The Hive Fund for Climate & Gender Justice and from Rice University Center for Environmental Studies.