With work by: Rana Hamadeh, Xandra Ibarra, Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo, Maryam Tafakory, Yue Xiang

Opening reception Saturday, October 25, 5:00 – 7:00 PM, featuring performance by Roco Córdova and guest dj 

Love Letters to Aliens, an exhibition and event series curated by artist Sholeh Asgary, considers the alien in its most expansive sense–from immigrants to extraterrestrials. Framed by the drawn, decomposed, or transgressed borders of body, land, and matter, the exhibition examines how seduction, repulsion, and obfuscation function as strategies of survival and celebration in the erosion of entrenched systems. From counter-archives to material excess and tender address, the artists of Love Letters to Aliens incorporate various mediums and methodologies in their work,  including sculpture, drawing, performance, video, and grief work. Collectively, these works pressure how archives, affect, and material form render certain lives legible while withholding others, asking us to meet the work from the edge.

For this exhibition, Southern Exposure partners with immigrant rights and prison abolition organizations and individuals to co-create hands-on tactical programs, workshops, and events that generate actionable resources for distribution across communities.

Asgary (b. Iran 1982) is a member of Southern Exposure’s Curatorial Council and an artist who engages performance, interdisciplinary forms, and collective processes to investigate, memorialize, and express the complexities of joy and survival inherent in diasporic and refugee experiences.