The Letters of Mina Harker

Image: Heesoo Kwon, Leymusoom Bridge (detail)

Artists: Dena Al-Adeeb, Sholeh Asgary, Kerri Conlon, Red Culebra (Guillermo Galindo and Cristóbal Martínez), Madeleine Fitzpatrick, Behnaz and Baharak Khaleghi, Heesoo Kwon, Tracy Ren, Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Rupy C Tut

Curator: Naz Cuguoglu

Dates: January 21 - March 12, 2023 (Opening Reception: Saturday, January 28th, 2-5pm)

Location: Berkeley Art Center

Drawing its title from the 1998 eponymous debut novel by Dodie Bellamy, a vital contributor to the Bay Area's avant-garde literary scene, The Letters of Mina Harker investigates speculative fiction’s potential for alternative world-building. The exhibition celebrates Mina, the central woman character from Bram Stoker's Dracula, who demands her own agency and voice in Bellamy’s narrative. Individual works by Bay Area artists come together in the space to form a chosen family and to suggest a speculative narration. Via diasporic artistic practices, the exhibition looks at the definition of “monster” as a symbol for the outsider and constructs an alternative universe with a new and otherworldly language.   

Rupy C Tut’s paintings, Tracy Ren’s multimedia work, and Madeleine Fitzpatrick’s works on paper, dissect historical and contemporary displacement narratives around identity, belonging, and gender while Heesoo Kwon’s video work focuses on an autobiographical feminist religion “Leymusoom” as an ever-evolving exploration of her family histories and feminist liberation. These works cohere together to highlight stories and symbols of diffuse diasporic identities.

Echoing the struggle of the vampire Mina, who possesses Bellamy’s body, three new works commissioned for the exhibition illustrates the tension in the diasporic experience for finding the right language for desires and fears without confining to one identity.  Chelsea Ryoko Wong’s painting celebrates racial and cultural diversity, Behnaz and Baharak Khaleghi’s new series of otherworldly and monstrous sculptural work questions women’s relation to patriarchal structures, and Kerri Conlon’s site-specific ceiling piece uses fabric to create a universe for these unearthly creatures to live in.

In conjunction with the exhibition, there will be two special performances by artist duos, Red Culebra (Guillermo Galindo and Cristóbal Martínez), and Dena Al-Adeeb, and Sholeh Asgary. Red Culebra will perform 4 Cycles + 1, a post-Mexican ceremony that responds to new age fetishes, magical realism, and the parochial moralities of American politics. Al-Adeeb and Asgary will perform At the Edge of the Sea, a collaborative transdisciplinary performance that uses the Epic of Gilgamesh as a departure point to excavate the elusive body across time and space.

Taking its conceptual shape during Iran's present feminist revolution — the bottom-up movement demanding an end to gender apartheid which followed the brutal killing of Mahsa Amini — this exhibition is an invitation to collectively imagine alternative world-buildings and history-makings. It is an invitation to speak up, make noise, and to remember.