Rebel Forms

Resisting essentialization. Continually negotiating between contexts. These define abstraction. So too does it describe Latine culture. In Rebel Forms, artists from across the Latine diaspora demonstrate how abstraction is utilized as more than a technique; it is a means of resistance to cultural essentialism. Against the expectation that Latine art must be figurative, narrative, or immediately legible, this exhibition foregrounds opacity as a critical stance. Form itself can carry a protest, shape can code-switch and mutate, and process can invoke complex histories. Aligning with decolonial thinkers such as Walter Mignolo, who argue that modern visual languages can be repurposed to generate alternative forms of knowledge outside Western epistemic dominance (The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 2011) Rebel Forms proposes abstraction as a site of refusal. These works do not seek to clarify identity for consumption; instead, they assert the right to complexity, contradiction, and partial unreadability.