Skip to main content

View works by Muriel Hasbun below.
Images courtesy of the artist and RoFa Projects.

Blue bust of woman on orange background.

ARTIST STATEMENT
si je meurs / if I die

Throughout my career, I have employed photography to investigate issues of identity, memory and inter-subjectivity. I have created a dialogue between the past and the present and between personal memory and collective history, sparking new questions about identity, cultural memory and place.

I grew up in El Salvador during a time of strife, within a Salvadoran/Palestinian Christian and Polish/French Jewish family. Through my work, I’ve explored my family’s history and it’s various exiles and diasporas, and have re-constructed a world inhabited by trauma and loss.

An extended portrait, si je meurs / if I die continues to explore a subjective, diasporic space that balances absence and presence. I pay homage to the relationship with my mother, Janine Janowski, construct my own sense of identity and allude to the legacy that she left behind.

The photos evolved naturally as we confronted the most human of destinies:
–As if I could ever get used to it
–As if the picture would somehow wish it away…

With these photographs, I share my intimate perspective to the historically-significant, public narrative of Janine’s life as a cultural promoter and founder of the renowned galería el laberinto in El Salvador during the civil war and its aftermath, now reactivated through laberinto projects, my socially engaged, arts, education and cultural legacy platform, also inspired by her.

si je meurs / if I die, 2015-16
Janine, Homage (José Nicolás), 2013.01.16, El Congo
archival pigment print, 2015
Image: 30 x 20 inches | Frame: 31 x 21 inches

si je meurs / if I die, 2015-16
Homage, (El altar de la memoria), 2014.03.25, El Congo
archival pigment print, 2016
Image: 20 x 30 inches | Frame: 21 x 31 inches

si je meurs / if I die, 2015-16
Juif, from the archive (1997), Washington, DC
archival pigment print, 2015/2021
Image: 12 x 18 inches | Frame: 13 x 19 inches

si je meurs / if I die, 2015-16
Janine (Agfa-Portriga), from the archive, Washington, DC
archival pigment print, 2016/2021
Image: 12 x 18 inches | Frame: 13 x 19 inches

si je meurs / if I die, 2015-16
Family Frames, 2016.07.06, from the archive, c.1960’s, El Congo
archival pigment print, 2016/2021
Image: 12 x 18 inches | Frame: 13 x 19 inches

si je meurs / if I die, 2015-16
Ojos (Mami y yo), from the archive, Washington, DC
archival pigment print, 2015/2021
Image: 12 x 18 inches | Frame: 13 x 19 inches

si je meurs / if I die, 2015-16
Janine, 2012.01.03, San Salvador
archival pigment print, 2015/2021
Image: 12 x 18 inches | Frame: 13 x 19 inches


 

Black and white image of palm trees, sky, and temple.

ARTIST STATEMENT
Santos y sombras / Saints and Shadows

I come from peoples in exile.

I became an adult with an extreme sensitivity to the irreconcilable…

Since 1990, I have committed my creative energy to developing a body of work that explores my family history and sense of identity. Santos y sombras is a refuge against silence and forgetting. The work becomes a personal diary where I mold the emotional aura surrounding my Palestinian/Salvadoran Christian and Polish/French Jewish family as I was growing up in El Salvador.

With the Todos los santos (All the Saints) images, I explore my memories of childhood as well as delve into the expression of identity of my paternal, Palestinian Christian family. Through the finding of family photos and documents, the collection of oral histories, and the re-evaluation of my own perceptions, I am slowly reconstructing a world that, with the process of assimilation and the passage of time, had become obscured.

The ¿Sólo una sombra? (Only a Shadow?) images take me into a world where silence is refuge; persecuted in France and in Poland during World War II, my maternal Jewish family had no alternative but to become invisible. Through my work, I begin to unearth the lingering echoes of those silenced voices, hoping to regenerate them, from burnt ash into glimmering light.

My photographic work, then, is a process of re-encounter, of synthesis, and of re-creation. Through it, past and present become interlaced in a renewed configuration; the Palestinian desert and Eastern European ash sift, shift and blend in the volcanic sands of El Salvador, to form the texture of the path on which I define and express my experience.

Santos y sombras / Saints and Shadows, 1991-2004
Todos los santos VIII (La llegada) / All the Saints (The Arrival)
selenium/polytoner gelatin silver print, 1995
Image: 17.5 x 11 inches | Frame: 25 x 20 inches

Santos y sombras / Saints and Shadows, 1991-2004
Todos los santos (Para subir al cielo) / All the Saints (To Go Up to Heaven)
uniquely blue toned or sepia toned gelatin silver print, 1995-96
Image: 12.5 x 18 inches | Frame: 20 x 25 inches

Santos y sombras / Saints and Shadows, 1991-2004
Todos los santos (Volcán de Izalco, amén) / All the Saints (Izalco Volcano, Amen)
toned gelatin silver print, 1995-96/2004
Image: 26 x 35 inches | Frame: 30 x 38.5 inches

Santos y sombras /Saints and Shadows, 1991-2004
Todos los santos (graecos schismaticos) / All the Saints (Greek Schismatics)
polytoner gelatin silver print, 1995-96
Image: 14 x 18 inches | Frame: 20 x 25 inches

Santos y sombras / Saints and Shadows, 1991-2004
Palestina llega a El Salvador/ Palestine Arrives in El Salvador, (right)
sepia gelatin silver print, 1997/2004
Image: 17 x 21 inches | Frame: 25 x 31 inches

Santos y sombras / Saints and Shadows, 1991-2004
¿Sólo una sombra? / Only a Shadow? (Faiga)
gelatin silver print, 1994
Image: 17.25 x 14 inches | Frame: 25 x 20 inches

Santos y sombras / Saints and Shadows, 1991-2004
¿Sólo una sombra? (Familia Lódz) / Only a Shadow?  (Lódz Family)
selenium gelatin silver print, 1994
Image: 16.5 x 12 inches | Frame: 25 x 20 inches

Santos y sombras / Saints and Shadows, 1991-2004
¿Sólo una sombra? / Only a Shadow? (The Gate)
gelatin silver print, 1991/1994
Image: 18 x 12.5 inches | Frame: 25 x 20 inches

   

   

Santos y sombras / Saints and Shadows, 1991-2004
¿Sólo una sombra? / Only a Shadow?
Left to right:
(Ester IV), (
Ester II), (Ester I), (Ester)
gelatin silver prints, 1993-94
Images: 18 x 13 inches | Frames: 25 x 20 inches


 

Black, red, gray, and tan images with lines, numbers and heart.

ARTIST STATEMENT
Pulse: New Cultural Registers / Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales

Is it possible to trace our journey through a visual record of the land’s pulses? Can we metaphorically inscribe our personal and cultural legacies onto the land and in the process make it our “terruño” and diasporic homeland? Can we repair misrepresentation and erasure?

Pulse: New Cultural Registers / Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales is a visual registry for the future, reframing the cultural legacy of El Salvador during the 1980s and 90s using personal and historical archives. It imprints the rescued archive of the renowned Galería el laberinto –an epicenter of cultural activity during the Salvadoran civil war, founded by my late mother Janine Janowski– along with my own photographic archive of the time onto the national seismographic record of El Salvador. The constructed photographs transform the land into a fully lived and witnessed “thirdspace” of memory and art, while mapping personal and collective history into a new meeting ground for a more hopeful, nuanced, dignified, and restorative future.

Transnational dialogue and decolonial visual representations are urgent. With 2.3 million Salvadorans living in the United States, we’re the 3rd largest Latinx population, often vilified by reductive and dehumanizing narratives of war, violence, and migratory “illegality.” As an immigrant to the U.S. and as a daughter of immigrants to El Salvador, I’m especially sensitive to how foreigners can be characterized (or erased) by the country that receives them. With Pulse, I recover, record and reveal the cultural heritage of my country of origin, challenging erasure, invisibility, prejudice, and established canons and territories. In the process, I pay tribute to Janine Janowski’s legacy, and to the artists who worked with the gallery, during a time that caused so many of us to migrate. I make space, with “pulsing desire,” for Salvadorans and Salvadoran-Americans to be represented, recognized and identified by our own art, culture and personal stories.

Pulse: New Cultural Registers / Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales, 2020, Pulse: Corazón (Homage, Luis Lazo)
archival pigment print on Canson Edition Etching Rag
Image: 30 x 20 inches | Frame: 31.5 x 21.5 inches

 

Pulse: New Cultural Registers / Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales, 2020
Pulse: Réplicas, 1986 (Homage, Julio Sequeira)
archival pigment print on Canson Edition Etching Rag
Image: 20 x 60 inches | Frame: 21.5 x 61.5 inches

Pulse: New Cultural Registers / Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales, 2020
Pulse: No registra temblor, (Homage, Armando Campos)
archival pigment print on Canson Edition Etching Rag
Image: 20 x 30 inches | Frame: 21.5 x 31.5 inches

Pulse: New Cultural Registers / Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales, 2020
Pulse: La novia (Homage, Rosa Mena Valenzuela)
archival pigments on anodized aluminum plate, 2020/2021
Image: 20 x 30 inches | Plate: 24 x 34 inches | Frame: 25.5 x 35.5 inches

Pulse: New Cultural Registers / Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales, 2020
Pulse: Seismic Register 2020.02.28.063
archival pigment print on Canson Edition Etching Rag
Image: 20 x 30 inches | Frame: 21.5 x 31.5 inches

Pulse: New Cultural Registers / Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales, 2020
Pulse: Seismic Register 2020.02.28.035 (Aparición: Mother and Child, 1983)
archival pigments on anodized aluminum plate, 2020/2021
Image: 20 x 24.5 inches | Plate: 24 x 29 inches | Frame: 25.5 x 30.5 inches

Pulse: New Cultural Registers / Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales, 2020
Pulse: Seismic Register 2020.02.28.048 (Niño/17-III-83)
archival pigments on anodized aluminum plate, 2020/2021
Image: 20 x 30 inches | Plate: 24 x 34 inches | Frame: 25.5 x 35.5 inches


 

Origami boat sof various colors.

ARTIST STATEMENT
barquitos de papel / paper boats

barquitos from the archive are inspired by the hundreds of paper boats that individuals have contributed to the barquitos de papel collective archive and installation since it premiered at the Cultural Center of Spain in San Salvador in 2006, as part of my Fulbright Scholar project, Backdrop: The Search for Home / Terruño: Detrás del telón.

Each barquito is an individual portrait. These little vessels carry the power of our individual and collective testimony. From San Salvador to Buenos Aires to Newark to Dallas, to Brussels and to Washington, D.C., we’re encouraged to remember, to come together to (re)discover our own story, using copies of our family documents and photographs. The tactile process of making paper boats engenders connection, even healing. Through the act of participating, we claim our individual story in the communal space. In photographing these barquitos, I realize that the details hidden behind the folds resonate as much as those readily seen.

These photos may be seen individually, yet they can also be added to the touring, interactive multimedia installation that encourages communal participation. The photos of paper boats stand on their own as documents of our diverse journeys. They highlight our individuality while gesturing that together, we may find our belonging.

barquitos de papel / paper boats, 2006-ongoing
interactive, multi-media, site-specific installation (detail)

barquitos de papel / paper boats, 2006-ongoing
…flag…
interactive, multi-media, site-specific installation
archival print on Epson Display Trans II Backlight media | 24 x 30 inches

barquitos de papel / paper boats, 2006-ongoing
…mis abuelos y el carro…
interactive, multi-media, site-specific installation
archival print on Epson Display Trans II Backlight media | 24 x 30 inches

barquitos de papel / paper boats, 2006-ongoing
…grandmothers…
interactive, multi-media, site-specific installation
archival print on Epson Display Trans II Backlight media | 24 x 30 inches

barquitos de papel / paper boats, 2006-ongoing
…Yellow National, Chicago, Lansing, Virginia…
interactive, multi-media, site-specific installation
archival print on Epson Display Trans II Backlight media | 24 x 30 inches

barquitos de papel / paper boats, 2006-ongoing
…me, Tere, Luis, Wanda…
interactive, multi-media, site-specific installation
archival print on Epson Display Trans II Backlight media | 24 x 30 inches

barquitos de papel / paper boats, 2006-ongoing
…who do you miss the most?…
interactive, multi-media, site-specific installation
archival print on Epson Display Trans II Backlight media | 24 x 30 inches

barquitos de papel / paper boats, 2006-ongoing
…can’t escape family…
interactive, multi-media, site-specific installation
archival print on Epson Display Trans II Backlight media | 24 x 30 inches

barquitos de papel / paper boats, 2006-ongoing
…free radicals in cells…
interactive, multi-media, site-specific installation
archival print on Epson Display Trans II Backlight media | 24 x 30 inches

barquitos de papel / paper boats, 2006-ongoing
interactive, multi-media, site-specific installation
Video, 3:23 minutes

Muriel Hasbun: Seismic Traces installation, Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series Galleries, Mabel Smith Douglass Library, Rutgers-New Brunswick
Click to enlarge.


End of Exhibition
Return to CWAH Virtual