Thursday, March 26, 2020, 6:30 PM
PANEL DISCUSSION opening the exhibition ADA TRILLO. LA CARAVANA
The New School University Center, Lecture Hall UL104
63 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003
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The panel on the occasion of the opening of Ada Trillo first solo exhibition in New York City, La Caravana, featuring the artist; Professor Alex Aleinikoff, Director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility; and Alexandra Delano, Associate Professor of Global Studies, The New School; will be moderated by the exhibition curator, Monika Fabijanska.
Followed by the opening reception.
Presented by the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, The New School
EXHIBITION: March 26-31, 2020
The New School
Skybridge Art Space
Eugene Lang College, 4th Floor
entrance from 65 W. 11th Street & 66 W. 12th Street, New York, NY 10011
In October 2018, Ada Trillo flew to Ciudad Hidalgo on the border of Guatemala, where the Caravan of Migrants was entering Mexico. Over the course of the following weeks, she traveled 2,600 miles to the U.S. border in Tijuana with 7,000 refugees, including 2,700 children, fleeing poverty and gang violence in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Through photography, video and interviews, she presents La Caravana not just as a political issue but primarily a humanitarian crisis. Trillo positions her images as a mirror to fake words, making visible the narratives that are missing from public consciousness. Many in her photographs are young women disguising themselves as men to avoid rape, many are persons with disabilities, many – LGBT people. This is her first solo exhibition in New York.
“The people that I have met are not the criminals depicted by Donald Trump. I intend to tell their stories of bravery, strength and perseverance, that defy generalizations that intend to divide. I show what hope, and the loss of it, looks like for the asylum-seekers of our era.”
Born in El Paso and brought up in Ciudad Juarez – at one time called the most violent city in the world – Ada Trillo explores in her work human rights crisis at the U.S.-Mexican border. Over the period of four years, Trillo traveled to Juarez to interview and photograph women in local brothels. Her series How Did I Get Here? (2017) exposes the nexus between rape and prostitution, women trafficking, and feminicidios—violent deaths of hundreds of women in Juarez. In La Bestia (2017), she documented perils faced by Central American migrants travelling across Mexico on cargo trains. If Walls Could Speak (2019) presents the challenges facing asylum seekers under the new "Remain in Mexico" policy. Involved directly in the work with affected communities, and donating the proceeds from her work to organizations that help them, Trillo is an artist whose documentary work verges on social practice.
ADA TRILLO's work is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was presented at the international festival of photography Cortona on the Move, Italy; University of The Arts and Saint Joseph's University – both in Philadelphia (2019); the exhibition The Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women's Art in the U.S., Shiva Gallery, John Jay College CUNY, New York; Passion for Freedom art festival, London; and Photo Meetings, Luxembourg (2018). Her work was featured in The Guardian, British Journal of Photography (UK), Hyperallergic, Smithsonian Magazine, HUFFPOST, CBS Philly, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Weekly, Philadelphia Magazine, Philadelphia Gay News, F-Stop Photography Magazine, The Candid Frame (U.S.); Al Dia News, Telemundo 51 (Mexico); Fotomagazin, Photonews (Germany); Le Quotidien, and Wort Luxembourg (Luxembourg).
Ada Trillo is based in Philadelphia, PA, and Juarez, Mexico. She is 2019 fellow at the Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Philadelphia, and the Leeway’s 2019-2020 Visual Artist-in-Residence at Fleisher Art Memorial. In 2018 she received Leeway Foundation's Art and Change Grant.
Image: Ada Trillo, Seeking Asylum, 2018, archival pigment print, 26 3/4 x 40 in. ©2020 Ada Trillo. Courtesy of the artist