Hixiapa, 2022

“Frías’ work is based in practices of care and spirituality that propose a future in which queer, Indigenous, and feminist knowledge is centered. A deeply multidisciplinary artist, they produce performances, GIFs, sculpture, video, sound, and many other forms of art. For this exhibition, Frías created a waiting room in a treatment center of the future. A response to the collective experience of close community and family members succumbing to algorithm-driven brainwashing, their project embraces the liminal nature of such spaces to probe the possibilities and dangers of New Age healing and thought.

Hixiapa (all elements 2022) (which means “center” in Frías’s ancestral Wixárika language spoken by indigeous people in Mexico) consists of three elements that engage Wixárika spiritual and creative traditions to guide the waiting room visitor’s experience. A large printed tapestry entitled Teiwáari, is a ritual device called a niereka that allows one to engage in world building, as well as contacting other realms. Xamuríiya (which means “to be caught in a web”) includes a variety of animated videos that play within the gallery and in other spaces in the museum as a looping channel of passive entertainment that is also an active algorithm, conditioning and coaxing people into the space. The final element, Mi Uwene (2022), replaces the banal design of the waiting room chair with a sacred shaman’s chair. By building out the contemporary space of the waiting room with Indigenous ritual objects that utilize computer-generated aesthetics alongside natural and fantastical human-made materials, Frías interrogated and reimagined notions of healing through the many gray areas between helping and harming.”

Claire Frost, Curatorial Assistant

UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Documentation by Impart Photography