A Method/Grieving Time
Jota Mombaça

07.09.2024 — 19.01.2025 07.09.2024, 20:00 West Den Haag in the former American Embassy, Lange Voorhout 102, The Hague

A METHOD/GRIEVING TIME is a site-responsive exhibition in which Jota Mombaça looks into the architecture and history of the museum’s building — the former US Embassy in The Netherlands — to unfold a questioning of imperial tools of temporal control and migratory legislation enforcement. This is Jota Mombaça's first solo show in The Netherlands.

The exhibition revisits a 2017 contextual painting, titled ‘The Colonial Wound Still Hurts, vol. 7: Honey Baby’, composed of the artist’s marriage and migration papers scratched and stained by her blood. The relationship between colonial bondage and migratory policies becomes patent as Mombaça looks into her path from Brazil to Portugal through these blooded documents, marked by the ever-colonial geopolitical continuum and seemingly post-colonial discontinuities. The work is expanded into a series of newly commissioned gestures spread across the first floor of the building.

On the second floor, the artist departs from her position towards a more transversal approach, involving a study of the poetry carved by former detainees of Angel Island’s Migration Station, an insular detention center for immigrants located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Run for around 30 years in the first half of the 20th century, the Detention Barracks were first abandoned and later transformed into a museum that critically looks into the history of US Imperial border politics, namely in relation to its role in the Chinese Exclusion Act and its effects on the Chinese-American community.

A newly commissioned video series, filmed in San Francisco, will be presented along with a series of site-specific installations that continue the poetic reflections on architectural confinement, imperial imaginaries, and arrested timelines found in the poetry carved by mostly anonymous Chinese immigrants on the walls of the detention facility on Angel Island. The office-like rooms that form the exhibition space offer a privileged standpoint from which to convey these reflections. In this sense, Mombaça’s work will investigate the architectural continuity between spaces of power and spaces of powerlessness, attempting to expose what lies within the imperial imaginaries of confinement and movement control.

A METHOD/GRIEVING TIME continues Mombaça’s critical engagement with the politics of migration in contemporary society, through formal, personal, and contextual gestures that attempt to remix a variety of positions into a consistent critique of the role played by Imperial entities such as the United States, the Netherlands, Portugal and Brazil in the making of a global order that continues to arrest timelines and map territories so as to confine the life possibilities of the living.