Newbodies/Nobodies II:
Bodies, Borders, Sutures
Curated by:
Norberto Gomez Jr.
June 6–28th, 2025
In collaboration with Capaz+IT & The Great Busk at Gallery 5 during National Immigrant Heritage Month.
Curator’s Statement:
Newbodies/Nobodies II: Bodies, Borders, Sutures returns with a renewed focus on the immigrant body—on movement, memory, and change. This exhibition brings together works that understand the body as something in flux: crossing, mixing, and breaking languages, borders, and time.
The artists—Giuliana Funkhouser, Leejin Kim, Andrés Lugo, Ralph Vázquez-Concepción and Shay Salehi—carry layered identities shaped by migration, displacement, and inherited memory. Their work resists a single story of immigration and identity. Instead, it holds space for complexity—for presence and absence, for what’s carried and what’s imagined.
Archives, bilingual code, and altered landscapes point to both fragility and strength. These materials don’t seek to resolve anything. Instead, they ask questions, and they map the fragments and sutures that create, that hold memory, that insist on being seen or heard, even in silence.
As Walter Mignolo writes, “Border thinking … is the necessary condition to think decolonially … we write with our bodies in the border”—a reminder that movement and knowledge are embodied. These works speak from that place of crossing, shaped by difference, refusal, flesh and reinvention.
Newbodies/Nobodies II continues to ask what becomes of the body in a time of mediation and fracture—but here, it does so through the lens of those who have crossed, who have returned, who remain in-between, and those who look back—bearing stories that are not their own, yet live within them all the same.
- Norberto Gomez Jr.
