Out of Sight: Picturing the Unseen highlights four emerging interdisciplinary artists whose work examines how certain groups of people’s visibility is routinely denied or controlled by others.

The exhibition asks who is unseen, particularly in the West, and considers how difference is frequently negotiated and constructed through forms of visual representation. It approaches the unseen as a process — an unseeing, reinforced through the systematic erasure, removal, marginalization, and avoidance of those deemed culturally other.

The artists included in the exhibition confront the intimate connection between visibility and privilege throughout history and into the present. They mine overlooked local histories and trace the margins, fringes, and niches of the societies in which they make their work. They locate those who are made or imagined to exist out of sight, and reveal how the bodies of their subjects emerge as sites where visibility can no longer be denied or suppressed. In their work, we see that unseeing is not only a reductive act — one of erasure — but is also productive, leading to the creation of myths, narratives, alternative communities, different temporalities, and physical structures of confinement and survival.