Aisen Chacin proposes a poignant view of children in critical conditions of our society. The artist, with a sharp sense of the cultural and social factors that affect the infant population today, creates highly incisive works in the form of photo-sculptures and video-sculptures: metal ensembles that resemble bathroom drains or street sewers in which the artist shows videos and photographs. A gallery of children’s faces of Chinese, Latin American, and African origin show through the metal grille, like from a limbo-prison. Chinese girls, children of the Brazilian “favelas” (shanty towns) and of the African continent, gaze the viewer from the depths of the drainage hole. Their calm, angry or vivacious expressions hide their social dismal and their fated destiny. They are abandoned children, obliterated by devastating forces of modern society. They stand as social casualties, as the injured party in the big game of Post-Capitalist society. Chacin’s conceptual work points out the precariousness and vulnerability of these individuals trapped in the voracious and destructive web of political and social violence.

Curator Milagros Bello, Ph.D.