Artists: Kaoru Arima, Diamond Stingily, Lucie Stahl, Chelsea Culp, Martine Syms, Dot Space, David Rappeneau, Margot Espinoza, Donna Huanca, Alison Veit, Puppies Puppies, Lulou Margarine, Mindy Rose Schwartz, Rob Halverson, Chloe Seibert, Jared Madere
Exhibition title: Rainbow
Venue: Queer Thoughts, Nicaragua
Date: January 22, 2015
Photography: Courtesy of Queer Thoughts
Queer Thoughts presents Rainbow, a group exhibition organized across three different locations in Nicaragua: at an apartment building in San Juan del Sur, a surf town on the Pacific Ocean; at a house in La Virgen, on the shore of Lake Nicaragua; and at a forest preserve waterfall in San Jose de los Remates, an agricultural village in the mountains of the department of Boaco. This is the first exhibition organized by Queer Thoughts in the country.
Rainbow takes its setting in the current political landscape of the country, whose govern- ment has recently begun preliminary digging for a new trans-oceanic canal that will rival the Panama Canal. Financed by a Chinese private interest group, the new canal will be significantly longer and wider than that of Panama, engendering a new era of Chinese monitored global trade that will utilize new mega-ships and circumvent the US super- vised canal in Panama. In addition to bisecting the country and the Central-American ecological corridor, the waterway will destroy forests and displace populations, bringing heavy ship traffic into Lake Nicaragua (the largest lake and source of freshwater in Cen- tral America). The Nicaraguan government has girded public discussions about the project, but claims the canal will bring newfound prosperity to the impoverished nation.
Long beholden to foreign interests, many Nicaraguans hope the new canal will generate long standing financial independence. Queer Thoughts presents an exhibition of the work of sixteen international artists as a proposal for an alternative means of exploiting per- sonal resources (emotional, physical). The canal will likely be built. Hundreds of kilome- ters away from the site of the construction, at the waterfall in San Jose de los Remates, wild ginger grows verdant and leafy in the moist rocks, while water makes its way down to the town.
