Kin: Kat Bawden & Ruby Que

Kin is a two-person exhibition by Kat Bawden and Ruby Que exploring ideas of kinship, connection, and community-building in apocalyptic times. The artists invite viewers to consider the complex and intricate web of relationships that shape identity, belonging and memory, proposing new ways of forming and maintaining kinship as a force for survival. 

In a series of photographs, Bawden invites participants to pose with her as a stand-in for their mother or a maternal figure. The photographs hover between documentary and fantasy, blurring the line between personal history and theatrical performance. By embodying the role of the maternal figure, Bawden creates a space to explore the complex spectrum of experiences we have within parental relationships. 

Que is interested in the intimacy built through shared language. What does it mean to speak the same language? How does one remember a lost mother tongue? What can be translated, and what must remain coded? Spanning text, sound and sculpture, Que’s new work investigates the ways in which we communicate and understand each other within chosen family.

Kat Bawden is an artist, educator, and curator from Chicago. She works across photography, video, performance, and light-based installations to explore the relationship between the body, traumatic memory, and perception. Central to her practice is photography as a means of mediating, questioning, and reconstructing reality. Kat holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been an artist-in-residence with Prairie Ronde, ISSP Latvia, and Artists in Public Schools. Kat has exhibited or performed at the International Center of Photography, EXPO Chicago, the International Museum of Surgical Science, Iceberg Projects, Filter Photo, and others. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Der Grief, Lenscratch, Chicago Reader, Chicago Sun-Times, and others. She runs Murmuration, an experimental art space and artist residency in Chicago.

Ruby Que is an interdisciplinary artist focusing on site-specific interventions and expanded cinema performance. They work with light to open portals and create hauntings. Drawing from their lived experience as a queer, itinerant immigrant, they meditate on yearning and find belonging in transit. Their work has been supported by Luminarts Cultural Foundation, ACRE, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, New Media Caucus, Roman Susan and Chicago Artists Coalition. Que holds a BA from Cornell University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they currently teach.