Alejandro Acierto: The Dead Are Not Altogether Powerless
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 16, 2019
6-9 pm

Exhibition dates: March 16 - April 13, 2019

“He gave his life to satisfy the State”
—Last Mile Blues, Ida Cox

“If there is no fear in the law, wala yan …
Yung hanging, once the spine is ripped off inside, wala na. Just like putting off a light.”
—statement by then presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte, May 17, 2016

This is an elegy for the departed, for the incarcerated, for those forced out from their lands. It is a pause and a repeating, a suspension of time tracing the shape of a fall tethered to imported wooden posts. A displacement of time, a consolidation of space, it echoes from the then and there only to be amplified in the here and now. Split by the ocean, it is a place outside of empire while acknowledging its tragedy. It is a haunting and a recurrence, a consistent presence of being.

It loops in the moment before the light goes out. It sways between the black and brown. It slows before the moment of rupture only to reiterate the conditions of its existence.

It is alive in its entrapment, caught before its transition. It cannot be lost for this is what remains.  

—Alejandro Acierto, March 2019

Alejandro T. Acierto is an artist and musician whose work is largely informed by the breath, the voice, and the processes that enable them. He has exhibited artworks, performances, and projects at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Issue Project Room, MCA Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Roman Susan, Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival, the Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival, Coop Gallery, and the University Galleries of Illinois State University, among others.

Acierto has held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, VCCA, Banff Centre, High Concept Laboratories, LATITUDE, Chicago Artists' Coalition and was an FT/FN/FG Consortium Fellow and a Center Program Artist at the Hyde Park Art Center. A 3Arts Awardee, he received his undergraduate degree from DePaul University, an MM from Manhattan School of Music, an MFA in New Media Arts from University Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and was an inaugural Artist in Residence for Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University. He is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Digital Art and New Media at Vanderbilt University.