"The exhibition Embattled Bodies: Trauma, Displacement and Dissent reinvestigates the ‘Body,’ as the governed, embattled, empowered bodies of resistance and agency. From Black Lives Matter to the aggressive assault on the Roe Vs. Wade decision or the rights for trans youth to receive care, Women, LGBTQ and BIPOC bodies are in a constant struggle for autonomy, equality, and self-representation. Through this exhibition, MSA and Vinegar Projects employ the agency of art as a platform for visibility and discourse. The works by selected Artists redefine, reform and recontextualize the body and its politics that explore diversity in media/perspective and innovation in a form that prompts critical dialogue, yet are inclusive, empowering, and serve as an embodiment of contemporary issues.

The exhibition features three dimensional and installation artworks that portray the human figure as forms of resistance, vessels of memory, experience, and history. Body as form of resistance includes dissent, struggle, and pain, it is persistent and unbound. Body as memory, as physical manifestations of recollection, reflection, and remembering. Body as experience, as a resolution of the will and manifestations of the imagination, elaboration of life lived. Body as history, as anatomical documents, evidence of the past, and surfaces of record for battlegrounds of battles won and lost."

- From Karlota Contreas-Koterbay's juror statement