Migration and Memory at Gallery 101

César Damián. Memory/Migration, image courtesy of Gallery 101


There is barely a country in the world that is untouched by the flows of migration. Propelled by hardship, war, and opportunity, international migration is a trend that is rapidly increasing. Mexican artist César Damián has traveled to Ottawa this week to install Migration/Memory, which opens tomorrow at Gallery 101. The exhibition explores the experience of migration and its impact on identity, memory, and cultural transplantation.


Visitors to the show will see portrait photographs of migrants suspended in jars that float and glow in the darkness over puddles of water. Audio tracks of people speaking of their personal experiences and explaining what migration means for them seeps through the space. Formally trained as a photographer, Damián has also begun working with video, and a recent work will be projected through the distorted surfaces of a glass jar.

Damián has been brought to Ottawa by Patricia Deadman, a member of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective. The two met in Banff and have been involved with a Canadian-Mexican exchange that has resulted in an exhibition in the Yukon Arts Centre in 2009, and continues with this exhibition.The jar is a metaphor Damián uses to reference how memories are contained and travel with people as they move around the globe. His aim is to provoke questions about how migration has defined everyone’s personal stories of who they are and how they belong. Just how fluid these stories and memories are - and how fluidly people cross borders – is alluded to in the sounds of flowing water which accompany the video and the puddles that seep over the floor.

Migration/Memory is on at Gallery 101 (301 ½ Bank Street, 2nd Floor) from October 28 – November 26, 2011. The opening reception is tomorrow night at 7pm and includes an artist talk at 7:30pm.

First published on apartment613 on 27 October 2011