Towards is pleased to be returning to NADA Miami with a two-person presentation by Kareem–Anthony Ferreira and Maria Trabulo.
Kareem-Anthony Ferreira
Kareem-Anthony Ferreira is a Hamilton-based painter whose large scale paintings explore the ways in which personal, social,and familial experiences coalesce to create hybrid identities. Central to Ferreira’s practice is an examination of the ways in which memory and identity are inextricably linked. Through these reconstructions, he highlights the malleability of both, underscoring the subjectivity of the lived experience while reminding us of our shared humanity.
Maria Trabulo
From Maria Trabulo, we will be presenting works from two separate, but interconnected series; The Reinvention of Forgetting (2018), and Fragile Stones (2022).
Central to Trabulo’s practice are questions of memory and history – and the ways in societies choose to remember, and/or alternatively, forget. The works within these two series focuses on how museums and cultural institutions are implicated in these processes – and more specifically, how they function during times of conflict.
For the series The Reinvention of Forgetting, Trabulo spent time in the vaults at the Bode Museum in Berlin, working alongside conservators and staff. The Bode was one of many museums in Germany that was shut down during the 2nd World War, with much of the collection carted off to secret bunkers for safekeeping. Ironically, in the case of the Bode – a fire tore through one of these bunkers just days after the war ended in 1945 and destroyed nearly a third of the museums sculptures and close to 450 paintings.
For The Reinvention of Forgetting Item ID6/99, Trabulo cataloged fragments of a 15th-century sculpture that had suffered extensive damage in the fire. Using advanced 3D handheld scanning technology, she documented the remaining fragments and then printed them at a larger-than-life scale. Because of the extent of their damage and the complex historical and political layers associated with these objects, these surviving fragments have not been exhibited and their history has remained hidden in the museum’s storage since the late 40’s.
In Fragile Stones, Trabulo turns her attention to the ongoing conflict in Syria. Collaborating with Syrian archaeologists, historians, and museum staff both within Syria and abroad, Fragile Stones focuses on the two museums within this reigon – the Raqqa Museum and the Aleppo Museum.
Starting in 2011 with the Syrian civil war and exasperated as ISIS took control of the city between 2013–2017, thousands of artifacts have disappeared from these institutions, either destroyed as a result of armed conflict or looted and trafficked on the black market.
Working from images created by museum staff as they tried to document, and prepare the museums for the impending conflict, Trabulo creates a series of distinct objects that allow the memory of the museum’s collections to live on, even if the individual artifacts exact physical location is no longer known.
Through her work, Trabulo draws attention to the fragility of cultural history–highlighting the important stories embedded in these artifacts as well as drawing attention to the ways in which selective social and geopolitical events shape both our understanding of the past, and impact how we might think about the future.
