Invisible Suffering: The Art of Diana Aldrete

The works featured in Invisible Suffering are a new body of work made possible by the Free Center’s Independent Artist Fund. This project begins with a provocation to hold space for emotional understanding of pain and possible imaginings for future action. It fuses my artistic visual expression with my academic research and interests on border studies, gendered violence in Latin America, and environmental and social justice to examine how we can process the world. I invite the spectator to come closer and look beyond the layers of metaphorical suffering, to therefore ask how we can collectively build on a politics of healing. Through abstraction, this art project comments on how suffering can become invisible if we fail to pay attention to the patterns and refuse to take a deeper look at toxic systems affecting our society. By actively dissecting the layers, we can use art to teach us how to make sense of the complexities of the world and begin acts of collective care so we may imagine and build better futures. This art project also undertakes a queer and feminist praxis (theory put into practice) in my methodology and in the process of Invisible Suffering’s exhibition. That is, being cognizant of the labor of women (especially women of color) and intentionally highlighting the work produced by Black, Indigenous, and people of color.