The AGGV exhibition Architectures of Protection places “protection” as a central prompt and a point of contemplation, while directing critical attention towards systems and structures that shape and impact everyday and sacred environments and encounters, alongside individual and collective relationships with the land.
Between March and May 2025, exhibiting artist Emilio Rojas explored beaches across lək̓ʷəŋən territory, observing simple shelters made from driftwood by local people. The installation in this exhibition features Rojas in performance using an obsidian mirror while interacting with several driftwood shelters. The videos are paired with Rojas’ floor to ceiling installation of his poem, Questions at the End of Empire.
This new commission was developed through a residency designed to connect Rojas with the land and the arts community, and the following images offer a behind-the-scenes look at the performance documentation, produced with the assistance of AGGV’s Kosar Movahedi and Toby Lawrence.
About the Artist:
Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary Mexican artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions, and sculpture. As a queer, Latinx immigrant with Indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration, and poetics of space. His research-based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments.
His work has been exhibited in exhibitions and festivals in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Japan, Austria, England, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Colombia, and Australia, as well as institutions such as The Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual Museum and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, Vancouver Art Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery, DePaul Art Museum, SECCA, the Syracuse University Museum of Art, the Johnson Museum of Art, and the Botin Foundation.
– Bio from Emilio Rojas’ website.
Visit the AGGV to see Architectures of Protections, curated by Toby Lawrence, AGGV Curator of Contemporary Art, featuring the artwork of Emilio Rojas, as well as Dana Claxton, Jessica Karuhanga, Beth Stuart, and France Trépanier.
Join us for the Summer Exhibition Celebration on June 18, 2025 from 5-9pm to see a live durational performance by Emilio Rojas.
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Image Credits: Footage from Emilio Rojas’ Artist Production Residency: March 3-7 and May 20-30, 2025. Commissioned by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Photos courtesy of the AGGV.
