“1,950 mile-long open wound / dividing a pueblo, a culture / running down the length of my body / staking fence rods in my flesh… This is my home / this thin edge of / barbwire.”
This piece of writing by cultural scholar Gloria Anzaldúa frames Gallery5’s “NEWBODIES/NOBODIES II: bodies, borders, sutures,” a group show curated by Baltimore artist Noberto Gomez Jr. Like the focus of Anzaldúa’s work, Gomez Jr. brings together artwork that explores borders (national, geographical, cultural, and many others) and the social, historic, and personal experiences of living near them, crossing them and abiding them.
To say the show is timely is a ludicrous understatement. June commemorates National Immigrant Heritage Month, but national governmental events of this particular June are its opposite. The nationwide raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), ongoing deportations of activists and students, as well as the president’s reinstitution of a version of his last term’s “Muslim ban” give this show urgent power.
The work in “NEWBODIES/NOBODIES II” presents an array of narratives, attitudes and realities of and around immigration of various kinds: stories of care and empathy, bureaucratic paperwork, technology, marginalization, family and others. Gallery5’s space is small and Gomez Jr. has made the most of it with deep and complicated work by artists Giuliana Funkhouser, Leejin Kim, Andrés Lugo, Ralph Vázquez-Concepción and Shay Salehi.
Leejin Kim’s “Root Unseen” (2025) centers Reverend Daniel Taimook Kim, Leejin Kim’s grandfather, and his journey of immigration to the United States in the 1940s. Kim’s grandfather, a Christian minister, was recruited by the Department of Defense to record radio broadcasts for the OWI [Office of War Information], an outlet for war propaganda and precursor to the international radio program “Voice of America” which President Trump ended in March 2025 via executive order, during World War II. These broadcasts were aired in Southeast Asia and featured Kim, speaking in Japanese, urging Japan to surrender and give up their hold over Korea. Kim’s immigration documents, printed on Korean paper, are displayed along a wall accompanied by recordings of his broadcasts. Leejin Kim informs us in corresponding wall text that Japan sentenced Reverend Kim to death for this act of betrayal. Among other things, “Root Unseen” is a multimedia dive into how immigrants, precisely because of their “in betweenness,” are used by nation states — it feels both historic and prescient.
Against a wall leans Shay Salehi’s “sanctuary” (2025), a collection of bright, color photographs mounted on a large sheet of steel. The photographs were taken at Woodstock Farm Sanctuary, an animal rescue organization, and depict a bird’s banded leg, a dewy spider web, a blurred image of what looks like feathers, and various, graceful photos of the bucolic farmland and homes where these animals are cared for. The images are warm, natural and sunny, and stand in stark contrast to the steel sheet to which they are affixed which visually enacts the concept of sanctuary; a comforting place where the vulnerable find safety from danger and harm.
Andrés Lugo and Ralph Vázquez-Concepción’s work “posthumano” (2021) is a video piece directed by both artists and with a soundtrack composed by Lugo who releases music under the name Los Dientes Hundidos en la Garganta (“Teeth Sunk in the Throat”). The video is abstract, fast-paced and frenetic, and features images of celluloid film that has been scratched, over- and under-exposed, and worn out and damaged in a dozen ways. About halfway through the film, the words “dentro del tiempo hay otro tiempo” appear on the screen (“within time is another time”). The video works as a portrait of another kind of time, not linear, but an experienced time. This is time measured by technological obsolescence, time experienced through language and bilingualism, and what time might mean post-humano: What comes after us? Without humans how will time be measured?
Can human extinction be thought of as a kind of massive, final, planetary deportation?
Giuliana Funkhouser presents us with two large cyanotypes that depict imaginal, fantastical worlds. In various shades of blue, we see blurred, dreamy landscapes that feel half-remembered and somehow timeless. A basket nearby holds small LED lights which when focused closely on the prints reveal vivid, glowing, unnatural purple hues. The glowing outlines reveals images and figures that otherwise are hidden and obscured — on one pass with the flashlight I saw a feminine-looking figure that I couldn’t make out before.
Funkhouser asks us to slow down and remember that surfaces never show you everything. And, in the context of Gomez Jr.’s curation, her work reminds us that immigration is full of stories, experiences, bodies, and complexities that are, but should never be, overlooked.
“NEWBODIES/NOBODIES II: bodies, borders, sutures,” is on display at Gallery5, 200 W. Marshall St. through June 28.
