As the summer season is coming to an end, so are our summer exhibitions. This is your last weekend to experience the works of Carmen Argote, Alberta Whittle, and Tr??ng Công Tùng on view at ICA LA through Sunday, September 10.  

While distinct in their practices and geographic contexts, Argote, Whittle, and Tr??ng are joined by the ways in which their works uniquely engage with movement and histories of migration—from the movement across borders, both physical and psychological, to the legacies of forced migration catalyzed by the exploits of empire and industrialization. Read more about the artists below and hear what the press has to say about these three exhibitions that you do not want to miss.   

CLOSING SUNDAY

Carmen Argote: I won't abandon you, I see you, we are safe

The work of Los Angeles-based artist Carmen Argote is distinguished by her commitment to process and her characteristic use of organic and biological materials—from bananas and palm fronds, to chicken excrement and human urine. Featuring works from Argote’s recent Mother series, I won’t abandon you, I see you, we are safe maps the artist’s journey toward a deeper understanding of her interior self and the binaries that it holds—adult and child, man and woman, resident and exile, individual and collective. Bringing together Argote’s interests in architecture, personal history, and psychology, the Mother series engages with the scaffoldings of the mind, body, and spirit to consider the role that art, like therapy, can play in disrupting these recurring behaviors.  

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Alberta Whittle: between a whisper and a cry

Originally from Barbados and currently based in Scotland, Alberta Whittle directly engages her diasporic heritage to create works that meditate on the journeys, both historical and present, of Black communities across the Caribbean Sea and beyond. This presentation, the artist’s first in Los Angeles, features Whittle’s 2019 multimedia installation between a whisper and a cry. Projected onto the remnants of a sunken chattel house—an architectural structure ubiquitous to the artist’s native homeland—the featured video is composed of archival and filmed footage with a narrative that traverses month by month through the hurricane season. From “June too soon” to “October all over,” Whittle’s work summons the ever-present ghosts of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the climate crisis as she chronicles the entangled histories of empire and environmental catastrophe across bodies and borders. Whether in drought or flood, water is revealed as a site to absorb, sink, and hold these hauntings.  

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