Christina Barrera’s multidisciplinary creative practice engages directly with political movements and injustices, from the detainment of immigrants and refugees at the United States-Mexico border to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests to the ongoing crisis in Gaza. Using printmaking, weaving, drawing, and sculpture, her embodied art-making acts as catharsis from the daily inequities she encounters, which in her words, she suffers as cognitively dissonant “psychic breaks.” Her work, which so often features figures with anxious expressions, reflects the emotional distress and sensitivity of someone who has rarely succumbed to compassion fatigue. Reimagining her practice so it interacts less explicitly to current movements, Barrera’s new series of drawings and sculptures represent chronodissonant, cyclical nature of anti-oppression and liberation struggles. On this shift, she noted:

“My work started to become a lot less about particular moments in history or particular movements or struggles, and a lot more about the cyclical nature of the struggle. It became about autonomy and possibilities for self-governance. Most of the time, my references are not to specific movements because there are too many, and they are all the same movement. All anti-oppression movements are towards liberation, and the liberation of one group or people or place, or even one person, moves towards the liberation of all, if we keep going.”

The works in Para Todos Todo reflect Barrera’s meditation on every battle for emancipation and every dream that anyone has ever had to be free and truly govern themselves. Curated by Daniela Mayer, Para Todos Todo, Free in the Open Air, Barrera’s first solo exhibition in New York City, showcases not just the artist’s complex emotions about the present but her hopes for the future. 

Evoking the visuals of protest marches, the otherworldly figures in Barrera’s The Procession (2024), a series of six large chalk-pastel drawings on paper, encircle the gallery. While the vibrant color palette and coquí-esque anthropomorphic banner-wavers initially present as playful, deeper observation reveals their complicated, angst-ridden expressions. Inhabiting an alternate imaginary in a borderless land, the processioners carry makeshift weaponry and wear whimsical armor, prepared at any moment to protect their hard-won freedoms. On the origins of The Procession, Barrera noted, “I realized I cannot just be emotionally processing all the time. I have to be able to look forward to some potential future.” Punctuating The Procession’s movement around the gallery, Barrera’s site-specific installation I'm Not Looking For Work But I Wanna Talk to You (2024)—a collection of unique inkjet and risograph prints featuring images both generated and amassed by the artist—transforms the gallery’s columns into a permanent flier-covered community board, a tribute to a key tool utilized by grassroots movements.

Although unified in their surreal visual plane, both the processioners and gallery-goers are physically divided by Barrera’s precarious steel fence sculpture, I Hope the Fences We’ve Mended Fall Down Beneath Their Own Weight (2022). A thoughtful obstacle, Fences serves as a reminder of what divides us: borders, ideas, and systems. Borrowing a lyric from The Mountain Goats’ song “No Children,” the titular phrase further speaks to the cycle of harm that occurs when (usually well-meaning) people repeatedly repair broken systems and problematic status quos, and the hope of what could occur if we stopped doing so.

Yet, if the wall represents an idealized, liberated world, the ground reminds us of a bleaker reality. A collection of rusted steel hands laid across the gallery floor, I Build With Bricks Laid Down Before I Was Born (2024), is Barrera’s evocation of bodies crushed under rubble. Through the disembodied hands—a symbol that both asks for and offers help—Barrera soberly reinterprets images coming out of Gaza, reaching across time and space to represent those who have been sacrificed across liberation struggles.

— Daniela Mayer

Para Todos Todo, Free in the Open Air will run from July 24 to August 17, 2024 at MAMA Projects, 224 West 30th St, #604, New York, New York, 10001.

MAMA Project hours: Thursday–Saturday, 12–6pm, or by appointment.