Global Urban Humanities/Future Histories Lab

Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration | Julio Morales (Fall 2022 Speaker Series)

Lecture, 75 minutes; Part of the Fall 2022 Speaker Series (Landscapes of Migration, Incarceration and Resistance)

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Recording of presentation at @BAMPFA Osher Theater; free and open to the public Friday, November 4, 2022

Speaker: Julio Morales, Artist and Curator

Description: Curator Julio Morales talks about his current BAMPFA exhibition, Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration, which considers the cultures and institutions of confinement that have been centuries in the making. The exhibition features newly commissioned works based on art historical images of incarceration. The twelve contemporary artists in the exhibition—Carolina Aranibar-Fernández, Juan Brener, Raven Chacon, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Ashley Hunt, Sandra de la Loza, Michael Rohd, Paul Rucker, Xaviera Simmons, Stephanie Syjuco, Vincent Valdez, Mario Ybarra Jr.—invest in community collaboration, work in an expansive range of media, and rethink traditional archival research to consider how artistic expression reveals the underlying logics of criminality and correction.

Julio César Morales, by deploying a range of media and visual strategies, investigates issues of migration, underground economies, and labor on the personal and global scales. Morales’ practice explores diverse mediums specific to each project or body of work. He has painted watercolor illustrations that diagram human trafficking methods, employed the DJ turntable, produced video and time-based pieces, reenacted a famous meal–all to elucidate social interactions and political perspectives.

Morales’ artwork has been shown at venues internationally, including; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; MUCA Roma, Mexico City; Prospect 3 Biennale, New Orleans, LA; Lyon Biennale, France, and Istanbul Biennale, Turkey. His work is in private and public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Kadist Foundation, San Francisco and Paris, and Deutsche Bank, and among others. In May 2018, Morales was awarded the Phoenix Art Museum’s Arlene and Morton Scult Contemporary Forum Award, which culminated in a major solo exhibition in 2019. In 2021, a solo exhibition of Morales work will be presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tuscon, AZ.

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This speaker series is part of a program of music and dance performances, exhibitions, public conversations, and courses called A Year on Angel Island (futurehistories.berkeley.edu/angel-island/), using the historic Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay as a jumping-off point to consider landscapes from China to Australia to Mexico as sites of memory and meaning.

A Year on Angel Island is organized by Future Histories Lab and the Arts + Design Initiative. UC Berkeley departmental cosponsors include the Departments of Music; Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; Ethnic Studies; History; and American Studies. Campus partners include the Arts Research Center, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, On the Same Page, Othering and Belonging Institute, Center for Race & Gender, Worth Ryder Gallery, and BAMPFA. Our community partner is the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.