Pedro Barbáchano | Shibboleth

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Pedro Barbáchano, “Achilles,” 2022

archival inkjet print on vinyl, aluminum, 80 x 60 inches (courtesy of the Artist)

Shibboleth’s departure points are the absence and negation of dissident bodies from ethnographical collections, historical documents, and museological archives. The case study presented observes The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities and Ancient Egyptian collections in major European museums. How can we surface a community that has been prosecuted for its sexual use of the body and betrayed by photography’s forensic capacity? Sentencing a group to a furtive existence removes the possibility of a political voice or social representation: of owning an image.

Through processes of material transformation and the use of plastic, these new relics simultaneously contain the traces of a violent experience and the dignity of an artistic object. Masculine nude self-portraits are presented as archaeological artifacts, as an auto ethnographical archive which is both a symptom and a response of resistance to biopolitical normalization. The transformation from stone to plastic in the process of reproduction, provide alternate forms of speech to unprovenanced artifacts from museum collections which incite suspicion about their missing background. Lastly, images of empty vitrines in the museum infer erasure and displacement which elicits the viewer to fill in the absences with the objects presented and question the reasons behind their concealment. The subject’s fragmentation in these portraits evades surveillance while their materiality is an embodied testimony of repression. Fossilized representations are what remain of images which have survived social rejection, censorship, and erasure

Pedro Barbáchano will be giving a tour of his Exhibition Shibboleth in The New Gallery’s main space on April 27th at 1PM MST.