2011 Create Change Fellow
A trained photographer and a native Harlemite, most of Uraline Septembre Hager’s earlier works were black and white photo documents of her community and the people within. The medium and nature of her work soon changed as she found herself in the midst of a community undergoing vast socio-economic changes and transitions. Finding it difficult to address the flux and transition of Harlem by documenting shifting moments as static moments, Hager began to work with objects and moving images.
Working across various media, concerns of transition, invisibility, and identity have continued to influence Hager’s current work. Extracting issues of social invisibility and obliteration from their normal cultural context, she explores these concerns through the lens of cultural hybridity, shapeshifting, and boundary-crossing. Historical narratives, past and current, personal and universal, are woven throughout her past and current projects to create and question paradigms and relationships. Some of her projects explore the discord between constructed memories and “factual” memories, question “expected norms” in public and private spaces, and tweaks the fine line between the ritualistic and the quotidian.
Hager received her MFA from Hunter College and her BFA from Brooklyn College. Her works have been exhibited in galleries and museums including Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Triple Candie, and Rush Arts Gallery, and The African-American Museum in Philadelphia.