Alien Excavations Closing & Pop-up

To mark the closing of Alien Excavations at the MXCL BNL LAB, Taller California will host a pop-up featuring the workshop’s past projects! Books and prints will be available from 12-5pm, including ALIEN, a three-part artist book produced by Taller California and the MexiCali Biennial. At 3pm, Taller’s founder and editor Lorena Mostajo will be in conversation with Armando Pulido to speak about this collaboration and the making of the exhibition. We hope you can join us for the final day of this project!

This exhibition marks the launch of ALIEN, collaborative book project between Taller California and the MexiCali Biennial. On the occasion of the PARA/normal Borders Lab, artists Ed Gómez, Luis G. Hernandez, Lorena Mostajo, Omar Pimienta, and Jessica Sevilla contend with the notion of the “alien” in relation to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Each created a series of images produced via digital offset prints (AL), glow-in-the-dark screen printing (I), and Risograph prints (EN) to produce three books that interlock to create ALIEN.

The artists collectively look to natural and built environments as sites of “alien” intervention that take many forms: traces of ancestral knowledge, Indigenous mythology, resource extraction, human migration, and extraterrestrial imagination. Alien
Excavations intends to expand on these presentations, showing visitors the texts, images, and visual culture that informed the final images produced by each artist.