A Method/Grieving Time

The exhibition reinterprets a 2017 contextual painting by Mombaça, titled ‘The Colonial Wound Still Hurts, vol. 7: Honey Baby'. This work consists of the artist's marriage and migration documents, which have been scratched and stained with her blood. The relationship between colonial oppression and migration policies becomes clear when Mombaça examines her journey from Brazil to Portugal through these bloodstained documents. The papers are marked by the colonial, geopolitical continuum and apparent post-colonial breaks. The work expands into a series of newly created artworks spread across the first floor of the building.

On the second floor, the artist takes a more broad approach and examines poetry carved by former detainees of Angel Island Migration Station, a detention centre for immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area. These detention barracks were operated for about 30 years in the first half of the 20th century. They were then abandoned and later transformed into a museum that critically examines the history of US imperial border policy, especially in relation to the Chinese Exclusion Act and its effects on the Chinese-American community.

A new series of video works, filmed in San Francisco especially for this exhibition, is presented along with a series of site-specific installations that continue the poetic reflections on architectural confinement and imperial imaginings. Just like the texts and poems carved on the walls of the detention facility on Angel Island by mostly anonymous Chinese immigrants. The exhibition's office spaces offer a prime opportunity to convey these reflections. In this sense, Mombaça's work will explore the architectural continuity between power and powerless spaces, trying to expose the imagination of incarceration and freedom of movement.