March 24 - June 4, 2023
From Houston Center for Photography:
“Houston Center for Photography (HCP) is pleased to announce Ada Trillo & the Sirkhane DARKROOM, two parallel solo exhibitions curated by HCP’s Executive Director, Anne Leighton Massoni. The exhibitions put at the forefront the loss experienced by family units and children by current immigration policies in geographic distant border countries United States-Mexico-Central America and the Middle East. Ada Trillo & the Sirkhane DARKROOM opens with a public reception on March 24 and will conclude June 4, 2023.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Born and raised in the U.S./ Mexican border region of Juarez and El Paso, Ada Trillo is a first-generation Mexican-American photographer. Currently based on the East Coast, Trillo’s photographic work focuses on human displacement, socioeconomic and humanitarian crises, and the profound social, political, and cultural transformations that show how poverty, gender, and structural exclusion and inequality have a particular incidence among women and children.
Her photographs have been featured in international publications, including The Guardian, Vogue, Smithsonian Magazine, and Mother Jones. Trillo’s work is in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other institutional and private collections.
Awards include The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Fellowship (2022), The Eddie Adams Workshop Canon Award (2022), The British Journal of Photography Female In Focus Best Series Award (2020), and The Me & Eve Grant from the Center of Photographic Arts in Santa Fe (2020).
Trillo’s first monograph, La Caravana Del Diablo: On the Run from the Northern Triangle to America was published by Komma (Netherlands, 2021). The book chronicles seven years of traveling with refugees and migrants from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Her photographs have been included in solo and group exhibits in the United States, Japan, Luxembourg, Italy, England, France, and Germany. Trillo holds degrees from the Istituto Marangoni in Milan, Drexel University in Philadelphia, and the International Center of Photography in New York, with a concentration in Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism.
https://www.adatrillo.com/
IG: @adatrillophotography
Serbest Salih is a self-taught photographer from Kobanî, Syria. His love for people transformed into having a camera by his side and taking portraits of every emotion that inspired him. After the Kobani War, Serbest moved to Mardin, Turkey, where he started studying business management and worked in humanitarian aid NGOs.
His passion for photography grew stronger when he started working in Sirkhane Darkroom, traveling from village to village teaching children how to shoot, develop, and print their own photographs. In the darkroom, children learned to shoot and develop their own film and tell their story from their own point of view. Photography is a universal and therapeutic language and encourages children living in the area — many of whom are themselves refugees from Syria and Iraq — to experiment with the medium as both a form of play and a means of understanding the world around them. In these images, produced by the project’s young participants, the city of Mardin and the vast Mesopotamian plain beyond become a backdrop to the miraculous dreams, games, and discoveries which play out within the space of the frame. In occasional moments, the war nearby is hinted at. A fighter plane enters the frame of an otherwise clear sky, but rather than reiterating scenes of suffering and trauma, these images depict their environment afresh through the unmistakable, wonder-filled gaze of a child: a vision punctuated by surprise and play, in which friends and family are captured mid-flight, upside down, leaning out of windows, and whimsically disguised.”
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