Exhibitions
Un catorce de mayo: Memorial de la Masacre del río Sumpul. A Collaborative Exhibition on Arts and Architecture
Centro Cultural de España en El Salvador (San Salvador)
July 11 – August 30, 2024
The Sumpul River Massacre Memorial: A Collaborative Exhibition on Arts and Architecture
Kadoc - KU Leuven (Louvain, Belgium)
March 6 -29, 2024
Un catorce de mayo: Memorial de la Masacre del río Sumpul
Centro Arte para la Paz (Suchitoto, El Salvador)
October 19 – January 1, 2024
Construyendo memorias: una mirada al archivo fotográfico de Ralph Sprenkels
Casa Museo Jon Cortina (Guarjila, El Salvador)
December 2023
The photographic exhibition, “Building Memories: a Glimpse at Ralph Sprenkels’ Photographic Archive,” was curated by Casa Museo Jon Cortina, Adriana Alas, Michelle Melara, and Estefannie Salgado. The exhibition featured 18 unpublished photographs, 17 taken by Ralph Sprenkels and 1 by an unidentified photographer. It was an interactive exhibition in which people could not only appreciate the photographs, but also provide information about the photographs, for example, if they recognized people, landscapes, or events. The exhibition was inaugurated during the commemoration of Jesuit Father Jon Cortina in the community of Guarjila, Chalatenango in December 2023.
Memoria Viva
El Colegio de Michoacán (Mexico)
October 2022
Adriana Alas mounted a one-day exhibition at El Colegio de Michoacan’s Latin America Annual Congress focused on Memoria Viva (2020), the first community book published by Surviving Memory. Based on the photo archive of photographs from Oxfam Canada, Meyer Brownstone, Tom Gabriel that were digitized by the project, the exhibition featured dozens of photographs about the refugee camps in Mesa Grande and La Virtud, Honduras, during El Salvador’s Civil War.
Ralph Sprenkels’ Archive exhibition in Chalatenango, El Salvador
Las Vueltas, Chalatenango (El Salvador)October 2022
In August 2022, Adriana Alas, Michelle Melara, and Irina Silber mounted an exhibition of 300 photographs from the Ralph Sprenkels’ archive in the community of La Ceiba in the district of Las Vueltas. The exhibition took place as part of the commemoration events of the massacre that occurred in the community on August 10, 1980. The Ralph Sprenkels archive documents the lives of repopulated communities in Chalatenango (and other Salvadorean departments) from 1992 to 1995.
Future Exhibitions
Daily Life in Australia Exhibition
Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen
Coming in 2025
The Salvadoran community across Australia will be invited to share their personal photo archives that capture their experience of life in Australia. The photos will be submitted through an open call via the Archiving the Present website. Images will be shortlisted, printed, and exhibited at Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen [Museum of the Word and Image (MUPI)]. All other submissions will be showcased digitally, both in the exhibition and online, offering a rich, collective snapshot of the Salvadoran diaspora in Australia.
ISTHMUS Canada x Australia
Coming in 2025
This exhibition looks to bring creative works from the Salvadoran diaspora in Australia and Canada. ISTHMUS asks what it might mean to centre the bridge, the borderland, the in-between? What might it mean to think, create, speak and practice from the isthmus as a site of dwelling.