CURATORIAL NOTE
This exhibition, organized as part of a University of Calgary doctoral research, combines the photographic works of six artists, each offering a deeply personal exploration of migration through themes of return, homecoming, community, identity, agency, and womanhood. Their works present counternarratives that challenge, transform, and nuance the intimate realities of migration, pushing back against the often sensationalized and oversimplified portrayals of migration in news media. By focusing on the complexities of the migration experience, this exhibition invites viewers to engage with the diverse and multifaceted nature of migration beyond conventional and institutional narratives.
ARTISTS
Dagne
Cobo Buschbeck
Dagne Cobo Buschbeck is a journalist, photographer, and visual storyteller focusing on gender, environmental, food, and health issues. As a black woman and migrant mother, migration and racism are also topics that interest her.
More than ten years of experience in photojournalistic coverage, development of documentary works, research, and photographic curation. Based in Chile, she was part of the Matraz laboratory, an independent research space on art, territory, and society, with a focus on gender and society.
In this instance, she developed the first chapter of Caribeños, a multimedia documentary work that proposes the vindication of the dignity of the bodies and
stories of people from the Caribbean who are migrants in Chile, through the story of Makanaky, Wiki, Martina, Mimy and the author. Caribeños was exhibited in the Matraz collective exhibition at the Departamento J
gallery, in Santiago de Chile.
Daniela Riveira Antara
Daniela Rivera Antara (b. 1996, Lima) is a Peruvian-Australian artist. A graduated from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and continued her studies at the Royal College of Art in London experimenting with various mediums including painting, performance, photography and writing. Rivera holds a degree in photography from the International Centre of Photography in New York.
In 2023, Rivera had her first solo exhibitions with the UNHCR in Lima, Peru held at the Museum Lugar de la Memoria and with the Ombudsman of Peru. Rivera has participated in several collective international exhibitions since 2016. These include "The Human Blueprint", Rotterdam Photo Festival, The Netherlands; Festival International de Fotografía, Chile; Photo IS:RAEL, Meitar Award for Excellence in Photography, Tel Aviv, Israel; Buenos Aires Photo with Galeria Imaginário; Photo Vogue Festival, Milan, Italy; The Foreign Correspondents Club, Tokyo, Japan; Head On Photography Festival, Sydney, Australia; Draw A Line, A Safe Space Gallery with UN Women UK among others.
Rivera’s photographic work has been featured in prominent publications such as National Geographic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Bloomberg, The Wallstreet Journal, Der Spiegel, Foto Feminas, the Harvard Review of Latin America and most recently with Sekka Magazine, shown onboard Etihad Airways. Rivera won the Lucie Foundation Emerging Photographer grant and has been a finalist and shortlisted with PhMuseum, Photo Lúcida Foundation, International Photography Grant and the International Women's Photography Association.
Fabiola Ferrero
Fabiola Ferrero is a journalist and photographer born in Caracas in 1991 and currently based between Colombia and Venezuela. Her personal work is the result of how her childhood memories contrast with nowadays Venezuela, her home country. Using her background in writing and investigative journalism, which she studied in Caracas (UCAB), she develops long term visual projects about South America, and specially Venezuela's crisis. Her educational background in photography includes the Joop Swart Masterclass 2019 and the Photography and Social Justice Program of the Magnum Foundation. She was a Fellow at the Columbia University's Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris for the 23-24 cohort.
In 2021, she received the Carmignac Photojournalism Award, which resulted in her first catalog, The Wells Run Dry. She also won a World Press Photo for the Long-Term Projects category in the South American region in 2023, the Inge Morath Award given by Magnum Photos in 2021, the 6Mois Photojournalism Award, and currently the Deloitte Photo Grant to support her new ongoing project, Reinas, a look into beauty and modernity in Venezuela.
She was also a finalist for the Alexia Grant, Eugene Smith Memorial Fund and the Leica Oscar Barnack Newcomer Award.
Interested in bringing opportunities to other newcomer photographers in the region, Fabiola founded Semillero Migrante, a photography mentorship program around migration, where free education is given to young Spanish speaking photographers.
Portfolio: www.fabiolaferrero.com
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Freisy González Portales
Maryam
Wahid
Rania
Matar
Freisy González Portales is an Anthropologist, Photographer and Musician (Caracas, Venezuela).
Her interest as an artist focuses mainly on the exploration of the notions of identity and memory,
migration and gender; weaving narratives based on experimentation and implementation of mixed media, such as analog and digital photography, archives, video, audio and the intervention of images through embroidery and collage. As well as fanzines, artist books and collaborative projects.
With her photographic projects she has participated in exhibitions and talks in Venezuela, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina, Ecuador, Mexico, Costa Rica, United States, France and Spain. She has also published in platforms such as Photographic Museum of Humanity (PH Museum), El Nacional, Últimas
Noticias and National Geographic. And recently received a grant from the ECO 24 program of Vist Projects (along with Andrea Hernández and Lety Tovar), as well as was awarded an Artist Residency in Madrid (Spain), by Boom!
Art Community, for her participation and proposal in the 24th Salón Jóvenes con FIA, curated by Tahía Rivero.
She belongs to the collections of institutions such as the UCR Special Collection & University Archives of the University of California (United States), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MoMA), the Archivo de Fotografía Urbana (Caracas, Venezuela) and the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain).
Graduate of the Master of Contemporary Latin American Photography Maldefoco of the Centro de la Imagen de
Lima (2017), and from the Semillero Migrante. Program of Visual Narratives on Migration (2022). As well as other training spaces and study programs in Venezuela, Peru, Chile, among others.
She was in charge and manager of activities at the library of the Centro de la Imagen de Lima, with experience in and as a teacher of photography in several universities and institutes. She has also been part of editorial and institutional research projects, based on anthropology, history and iconography.
IG: @freisygonzalez
Vimeo: Freisy González
freisygonzalez@gmail.com
Maryam Wahid is a British photographer and photography consultant, currently the Head of
Program and Outreach for the Tasweer Photography Festival by Qatar Museums. Her work spans
visual storytelling, conceptualisation, production, curation, and interactive engagement. Wahid’s
photography practice explores themes of identity, migration, memory, womanhood, and the concept of home and belonging.
Wahid holds a First-Class BA (Hons) in Photography from Birmingham City University and has won numerous awards, including from the British Journal of Photography, Firecracker, Format Festival, Photoworks, and the Magenta Foundation. Her work has been featured in major
publications such as The Guardian, The Financial Times, and Wellcome Collection, and exhibited
nationally and internationally, with notable exhibitions at Midlands Arts Centre (Birmingham, 2022), The Photographers Gallery (London, 2022), and Ffotogallery (Wales, 2019).
In addition to her artistic practice, Wahid manages initiatives to promote photography and community engagement. She has judged art competitions for Photoworks and The New Art Gallery Walsall and appeared on BBC’s Great British Photography Challenge with Rankin. Wahid was invited to join the judging panel for the prestigious Hold Still photography competition,
spearheaded by Her Royal Highness, The Princess of Wales, Catherine Middleton, alongside other
distinguished judges.
Born and raised in Lebanon Matar moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born Palestinian/American artist and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography.
Matar’s work has been widely exhibited in museums worldwide in solo and group shows, including Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Carnegie Museum of Art, ICA/Boston, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Fotografiska, Institut du Monde Arabe, and more. It is part of the permanent collections of several museums.
A mid-career retrospective of her work was on view at Cleveland Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the American University of Beirut Museum. Upcoming solo exhibitions in include the Middlebury Museum of Art, and the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University.
Matar received several awards including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant, 2021 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grants, 2011 Griffin Museum of Photography Legacy Award. She was a finalist for the Oskar Barnack Award 2023, Arnold Newman Prize 2022, Outwin Portrait Competition with an exhibition at Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery/DC, and Taylor Wessing Prize with an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
She recently curated “Louder Than Hearts”, a group exhibition of women from the Arab World and Iran at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC.
Matar serves on the board of BeMA, the Beirut Museum of Art.
Matar published four books:
SHE, 2021; L’Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; Ordinary Lives, 2009.
She is working on her upcoming book: “50 Years Later: Where Do I Go?”, 2026
RESEARCH & RESEARCHER/CURATOR
Given the politicized nature of migrant women's representation in international media, this research explores photographic practices that capture their experiences, emphasizing the interplay of aesthetics, politics, memory, and migration. In exploring these intersections, the study frames the political as a space resulting from human relations and acts of dissensus during the engagement with images and image-making practices; aesthetics as understood as a form of knowledge and sensory appearance mobilized through photography, and migration as a force that informs the creation of visual narratives. The study focuses on self-authored visual narratives created and circulated by six migrant women photographers that challenge the simplistic representation of migrant women as a humanitarian symbol of distress. In particular, the research discusses how these photographic projects subvert the conventional images of migration, reframe the discourse through personal stories and engage with a subjective, feminist postmigrant photo aesthetics.
Amanda Zanco
Amanda Zanco is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary, where she holds the 2024 Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship and 2021 Eyes High Doctoral Recruitment Scholarship. She received a Master's degree in Social Communication with Honours (Summa cum laude) from Universidade Metodista de São Paulo, funded by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), and a bachelor's degree in Advertising and Publicity from UMESP. Her research centers on the intersection of photography, art, migration, critical media and research-creation. Her work has been published and presented in national and international conferences and journals.
The Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship generously funded this exhibition and the associated research. We sincerely thank their support, which has made this work possible.