With works by Esvin Alarcón Lam

Opening: Thursday, 16.01.25, 19h

Esvin Alarcón Lam’s projects open up new ways to think about our critical and affective relations with the past. The Guatemalan artist explores historically and subjectively evolved forms of collectivity in a variety of media and materials: painting, sculpture, performance, textiles, photography, sound & video, plants, foodstuffs, and public urban spaces are among the means used to convey intuitive processes and artistic observations.

In the exhibition Intuitive Porosity at daadgalerie, existing and newly created works provide insight into Alarcón Lam’s deep engagement with his own family’s history of immigration from China to Guatemala, as well as with the Chinese diaspora in Central America, which he examines and interprets from a queer perspective. The presentation focuses particularly on the role of public space in Alarcón Lam’s work and the strategies he employs to reflect on the significance of community and collective transnational history. The use of intuition as an artistic tool should thereby not only be understood as a critique of supposedly objective, male, Eurocentric knowledge; instead, as a state of living, active knowledge, intuition is associated with the potential of permeability and the fragile connections that porosity displays as a material and conceptual quality.

Esvin Alarcón Lam was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 2023/2024.