Allegra Hangen: AMÉRICA
November 7, 2026 – February 14, 2027
OPENING RECEPTION
Saturday, November 7 from 7 – 10PM
AMÉRICA is a bilingual video by Mexico City–based artist Allegra Hangen that seeks to offer a way to talk between cultures through poetry—visual, written, and spoken.
The poems included in this video are translations of the original poem America (1956) by Allen Ginsberg. It was initially translated to Spanish by Mexican writer Luis Alberto Arellano and the Spanish translation was subsequently translated back to English by U.S. writer Megan Frye, creating a kind of game of telephone that is influenced by cultural signifiers, cotidian phrases, and nuances of the language.
As Mexican poet and philosopher Octavio Paz wrote,
“Cada texto es único y, simultáneamente, es la traducción de otro texto. Ningún texto es enteramente original, porque el lenguaje mismo, en su esencia, es ya una traducción: primero, del mundo no-verbal y, después, porque cada signo y cada frase es la traducción de otro signo y de otra frase.”
“Every text is unique and simultaneously, it is the translation of another text. No text is fully original, because language itself, in essence, is already a translation: first, of the nonverbal world and later, because every symbol and phrase is a translation of another symbol and another phrase.”
The process of translating translations in this film emulates the process that language is succumbed to everyday within our globalized communities. It asks the questions: although similar basic ideals, desires, and needs are shared from individual to individual across the globe, to what extent do these get lost in translation? How often do we fight for the same thing as “the Other” but neither of us listen?
AMÉRICA is created purely with found footage from public online archives of families’ travel films from Mexico and the United States, including images made by the “Other” in a foreign geography juxtaposed with images of self-representation. The film looks to question the discrepancies of representation when this authorship changes hands.
Accompanied by the music of Rob St. John, Surface Tension River Lea—a loop recorded on tape that had been physically placed in the River Lea—the audience can both see and hear the simultaneously destructive and creative process of representations existing in a consistently degrading feedback loop.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Allegra Hangen (US) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Mexico City. Her practice spans experimental video, installation, photography, sound, and sculpture to investigate how architecture, infrastructure, and images mediate power and perception. Activating archival research alongside industrial elements like concrete, plaster, and acrylic, Hangen deploys processual feedback loops, glitches, and erasure to expose historical patterns of control and propose counter-narratives to the promises of modernity.
She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and a BFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design. Hangen’s work has been exhibited internationally, including the MoCA Biennial 2024 (Arlington, VA), the Giardini della Biennale (Venice), the Salina Biennial (Kansas), and the solo exhibition between / two skies / And a firm ground at the Fred Simon Gallery (Omaha, 2024). Recent and notable group exhibitions include Valle de Lágrimas at Espacio Báltico (2026), Nuevas Voces, Nuevos Procesos at Galería Hilario Galguera / Casa Hotbook (2026), and presentations at Museo Vizcaínas (in collaboration with El Museo del Barrio, NYC), Salón Silicón (CDMX), and the Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Oaxaca).
Her practice has been supported by fellowships at The Luminary (St. Louis) and The Lab Program (CDMX), alongside project funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mid-America Arts Alliance, and Amplify Arts. Hangen was previously the co-founder and co-director of Fortuna, a residency exchange program between Mexico City and Omaha, NE (2021–2026).