Carmenza Banguera: The Visible, the Laughable, and the Invisible

In her three-part exhibition project, The Visible, the Laughable, and the Invisible, Afro-Colombian artist Carmenza Banguera explores tropes of blackness and belonging, conjoining perspectives across two multicultural democracies, Colombia and the United States. Banguera’s works are partly based on observations drawn from an exploratory trip to Chicago in the spring of 2019 and reviewed through the lens of the Afro-Colombian experience in her hometown of Cali. Informed by the “racial reckoning” taking place in the United States following the murder of George Floyd, the exhibition offers a compelling meditation on the transnational meanings of the “resistant” black body as invulnerable and thus capable of arduous and unsafe work. Banguera offers a striking critique of this gendered and racialized notion of bodily resistance, baring the contradictions of such embodied citizenship as they subtend black Americans’ daily dealings with pervasive state violence and constrained labor markets. Conceived in close collaboration with the Contours of Black Citizenship in a Global Context research project at the Neubauer Collegium, this exhibition compels us to imagine new ways of being and seeing.

Curated by the Contours of Black Citizenship in a Global Context research team in collaboration with Dieter Roelstraete.

Gallery open by appointment

Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

5701 S. Woodlawn Avenue

Chicago, IL 60637

https://www.neubauercollegiumgallery.com/current