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Archiving Edging: The edges of archives and to edge an archive: olivier & Martín Wannam

Opening Friday, February 2nd 6–9pm

olivier is a research-based artist+writer and archives worker. They speak Cantonese at home with their demonic cat.

Their practice is rooted in the ephemerality of archival theory, queer and trans theory, and ufology. They toy with poetics and semiotics, caress languaging and linguistics, live within speculative projects, artists’ books, videos, performative lectures, happenings, surveys, drawings, installations… and lead a secret mail art practice/life.

olivier holds an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Born and raised in British-Hong Kong, they are now temporarily floating in the rivers of Chicago after some adventures in the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Ocean.

For the past ten years, their time-machine has been stuck in this dimension. So it goes.

Martín Wannam is a visual artist and educator whose work critically examines Guatemala’s historical, social, and political climate, focusing on dissident perspectives and freedom dreaming for the cuir individual. He works from an equatorial perspective on the intersection of brownness and wildness using the foundation of iconoclasm and the aesthetic of maximalism through the tools of photography, sculpture, and performance, exploring the individual and collective
impact of immigration, systematic structures, utopia, and family.

He received his MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico in the Spring of 2020, a Diploma in Contemporary photography from La Fototeca (GT) in 2016, and a BA in Graphic Design from the Universidad Rafael Landivar (GT) in 2015. Wannam has exhibited nationally and internationally, including various group and solo shows in Guatemala, The United States, Rotterdam, Netherlands, and Korea. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in Studio Art at UNC Chapel Hill and part of the Fronteristxs Collective, a collective of artists fighting for migrant justice and the abolition of the prison industrial complex.