Project 27
Queloide - Thelma Vanahí
Curated by Paloma Chavez Muente
April 8th - May 27th 2022
Thelma Vanahí's solo exhibition, Queloide, weaves a collective imaginary born from the persecution and massacre of the Haitian population in the Dominican Republic in 1937. The show brings together a variety of works that include photography, collage, audiovisual installation, and textile.
A keloid evokes the scarring of a wound, a thickened scar tissue that leads to the question of how the cut occurred and provokes lifting the layers to remember what happened.
Thelma’s work traces a personal narrative as a biography of the Dominican and Haitian social identity. She draws critical cartographies, that embody racist, political, and militarised violence, to relive memories as an antidote to exorcise the pain.
Like a scar, the stitches on the back of Thelma's textile piece, Countless Drops Swallow Us, lead us to reflect on what is visible, knowable, and allow the unpicking and re-stitching of the imaginaries of intergenerational trauma. Keloid talks about wounds, those that remain embedded under the skin, and those that need to be surfaced to heal.
The 1937 massacre, otherwise known as ‘the cut,’ is a recurrent subject in various contemporary art practices, as a space for dialogue around notions of territory, otherness, and current political debates; such as the deporting of pregnant Haitian women, the exploitation of workers, and the building of a wall to divide the two countries that share the island. In the series of maps, Cartographic Narrations, Thelma depicts the island as a whole, blurring the frontier line and proposing a discourse of fraternity. In Who Can Dream? a pregnant black woman stands in profile, holding a basket of food on her head, and looks towards the horizon, ‘as if looking to the future,’ Thelma comments, ‘there is hope and that is a powerful thing.’
Thelma Vanahí is a Dominican-Spanish visual artist and photographer based in Barcelona.
Since 2010, she has developed extensive multidisciplinary projects with a participatory methodology about Dominican culture and its imaginaries, providing an insight into identity and life in the Caribbean country.
Thelma’s work has been exhibited in Centro de la Imagen and Festival Photoimagen in the Dominican Republic and in various collective shows in Barcelona. Academically, her work has been the subject of studies dealing with identity and culture at universities in Spain and the United States.
She has a Diploma in Audiovisual Communication, a Postgraduate degree in Costume Design and a Master in Global History from Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She is a professor of Photography Direction and Western History in the Faculty of Humanities at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra.