Dear ICA LA Community,

This summer, ICA LA is thrilled to be featuring solo exhibitions with Carmen Argote, Alberta Whittle, and Tr??ng Công Tùng. While distinct in their practices and geographic contexts, these three artists are joined by the ways in which their works uniquely engage with notions of 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. For all three artists, these will be their first solo museum exhibitions in Los Angeles.  

Each one of us has our own story about what brought us here, what we left behind, and who was here before. Presented together, these three upcoming exhibitions illuminate the interconnections of our movement stories as they invite us to think deeply about our relationships to land, to water, and to one another. 

Scroll down below to learn more about each exhibition and be sure to save the date for our Open House on Saturday, June 10 to celebrate with the featured artists and toast to this new season of shows!

Happy Friday,
Team ICA LA

RSVP for Open House

OPENING JUNE 10
Carmen Argote: I won’t abandon you, I see you, we are safe

The work of Los Angeles-based artist Carmen Argote (b. 1981, Guadalajara, Mexico) 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. Often collected on her daily walks, these materials are reconstituted into artworks through the ritual actions of braiding, rubbing, and consuming, which speak in significant ways to the artist’s relationship to body and place. Argote’s most recent series, titled Mother, brings these site-specific investigations inward.  

Including drawings, sculptures, and works in process, I won’t abandon you, I see you, we are safe maps Argote’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. In this featured body of work, the artist traces patterns of patriarchal violence across cultures and generations. Bringing together her 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.  

This presentation also signals a new chapter for the artist’s Mother works. In the galleries, Argote and invited collaborators including her mother, Carmen Vargas, as well as Young Chung, Daniela Lieja Quintanar, Mary McGuire, and Cedric Tai, will participate in collective actions that allow the presentation—like Argote’s work—to evolve over the course of the exhibition.  

Operating at the threshold between the physical and psychological, I won’t abandon you, I see you, we are safe gives material form to the inhabitants of the interior architectures of the self—those we project, those we neglect, those we desire, those we defend, and those we have yet to discover. 

Learn More

Alberta Whittle: between a whisper and a cry
Originally from Barbados and currently based in Scotland, Alberta Whittle (b. 1980, Bridgetown, Barbados) 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. Challenging the ongoing erasure of Black bodies, voices, and narratives, Whittle’s research-driven practice is informed by an active process of remembering, often resulting in choreographed installations that invoke self-compassion and collective care as integral to building a decolonized future.  

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.  

In its narrative, the work references the writings of Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe, undertaking her description of anti-Blackness as a kind of “weather”—an almost atmospheric phenomenon—that oscillates and submerges, washing over entire communities like the waves of blue that envelop the gallery visitor. Interrogating the memories and life that these waters hold, between a whisper and a cry asks audiences to consider their own bodies and their relationship to the ongoing effects of colonialism and slavery still rippling outward. In this way, Whittle’s work is an offering, an act towards repair, an insistence on survival, and an invitation to release.

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Truong Cong Tung

Drawing upon mystical ritualism and indigenous mythologies, the work of Tr??ng Công Tùng (b. 1986, ??k L?k province, Vietnam) is characterized by a poetic sensitivity to history, landscape, and materiality. His dynamic installations often incorporate natural materials that bear the traces of time and the echoes of generations and are composed in such a way as to reimagine the land from a site of colonial empire to one of communion. Disrupting the boundary between the physical and spiritual worlds, Tr??ng’s practice reconfigures elements of each to reframe the relationship between the living and the inanimate. 

The exhibition—Tr??ng’s first museum solo presentation—brings together a constellation of sculptural and video works produced over the last three years, including a curtain of wooden beads made from coffee, cashew, and forest trees, materials that have been exploited throughout the artist’s homeland in the Central Highlands of Vietnam because of the relentless forces of war and industrialization. Also on view is an installation made from gourds, water, soil, and seeds. The gourds are joined by a web of clear plastic tubes through which flowing water and earth create an undercurrent of migration from one gourd to the next.  

Reminiscent of the forest’s depths with its darkness, shadows, and the gentle hums of insects and other life, Tr??ng Công Tùng’s living exhibition requires ongoing cultivation and care, allowing it to become a metaphor for, and a journey of, co-existence and transformation. 

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