Flow States: La Trienal 2024
by Meg McCormick
April 8, 2025
Matthew Herman
El Museu del Barrio recently concluded its exhibition Flow States: La Trienal 2024, the museum's second survey of Latinx contemporary art. Organized by Chief Curator Rodrigo Moura alongside curators Susanna Temkin and Maria Elena Ortiz. The exhibition's title reflects its central themes: the fluid, ever changing nature of the diaspora and intercultural dialogue. The title emphasizes the flowing properties of identity alongside the physical movement of people through migration. These Ideas-of-shifting personhood and migration are explored through a diverse collection of media, encompassing photography, painting, sculpture, textiles and installation work. The artists featured have varying backgrounds and levels of experience, fostering exchanges across time, place and cultures. This collection of art serves as an expansive tool to discuss transforming identities and their relation to physical space and memory.
The large-scale exhibition included works from more than thirty artists from the United States, Puerto Rico, The Americas, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia. Among these artists I was particularly engaged by the work of Wildine Cadet, which utilizes photography to powerfully explore the overarching themes of migration and fluid identity.
Widline Cadet is a Haitian born multimedia artist, who currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Cadet works primarily in photography incorporating elements of sculpture, sound and video. Museu del Barrios triennial exhibition features an installation piece by Cadet that spans an entire gallery wall, merging her interdisciplinary techniques. The piece includes four black and white framed photographs hung over a large scale print of leaves and purple flowers that entirely cover the wall. The largest of the images features a small mounted screen with a connected set of headphones, layering image and sound.
In an interview with Frieze magazine, Cadets describes her work as being a method to know and represent past generations, while also acting as a method of being known to future ones. Her work is born from a desire to create tangible life through photography that addresses the lack of archival documentation of her own grandparents and relatives. Cadets' combination of sound, video and image serves as documentation of the lives and vitality of her community in Haiti translated through her diasporic experience living in America. Her photographs flatten time, constructing a place for “impossible meetings” between ancestors who could not exist in the earthly world.
Meg McCormick
A striking example from the installation is the photograph on the far left of this installation, Cadet manifests this impossible meeting space with a black and white image of three women. In the Frieze interview, Cadet speaks about this photo directly. She reveals it was informed by a myth that she was told as a child in Haiti, involving an animal-like creature that transforms at night and stalks babies. The three women are engulfed in stark black that resolves at the top of the image to reveal a forestry external atmosphere. The woman in the center is turned back towards the viewer, her back and face are partially illuminated revealing just her right eye. The dreamlike tone created by the darkness of the image and the woman's gaze is a common characteristic of Cadets images. This photo makes physical the persisting presence of myth and memory, instilled in Cadet by her Haitian uprising.
The installation by Wildine Cadet in Flow States presents a nuanced reflection on identity, transcending material, time and cultural boundaries. Cadets work captures the central themes of the exhibition, the fluidity of personal identity and the lingering resonance of diaspora.