About the Exhibition

During a polarized and bewildering election season, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum facilitates Aram Han Sifuentes’ collaboration with artists, radical thinkers, and organizations to create her insurgent project Official Unofficial Voting Station: Voting for all who legally can’t. From September 8 through election day on November 8, the discontented and disenfranchised cast unsanctioned ballots at JAHHM and other Official Unofficial Voting Stations across the country and in Mexico. 

As a legal alien of the United States who is barred from voting, Aram Han Sifuentes’ Official Unofficial Voting Stations inserts an unsanctioned voting process into this year’s election season. This project is an objection to the exclusion of herself and others from central democratic processes. Official Unofficial Voting Stations will be hosted by collaborators: Roberto Sifuentes (Chicago), Verónica Casado Hernández (Baltimore/DC), Lilah Thompson (Philadelphia), Mara Baldwin (Ithaca), Brandon Bullard (Detroit), and Maritea Daehlin (Oaxaca/Chiapas, Mexico). All ballots cast at these voting stations are returned to JAHHM to be counted and contributed to an installation at the Museum.

As a part of the project, the Museum hosts the voting station VOX POP: The Disco Party designed by Sifuentes and collaborator Lise Haller Baggesen. VOX POP finds common cause with marginalized spaces, like the disco club, where a plurality of voices energizes and empowers. For the installation Baggesen and Sifuentes employed hand-dyed batik fabrics that twist typical American political visual vernacular. Soundscapes for the project were provided by DJ Sadie Rock. After November 8, VOX POP was transformed into a suggestion station where demands, questions, and critiques were be forwarded to the president-elect and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on the last day of the exhibition March 5, 2017.

Aligned with the Museum and the history of the early social reformers of Hull-House, Aram Han Sifuentes’ project explores urgent questions about participation, exclusion, and citizenship in the United States.