This exhibition is the fifth such collaboration between EPMA and the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez (MACJ). From over two-hundred submissions this year, jurors Gilbert Vicario, Selig Family Chief Curator, Phoenix Art Museum, and Carlos E. Palacios, Curator, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, MACJ staff, and EPMA curator Kate Green selected thirty-two artists or collectives living along the U.S.-Mexico boundary whose work addresses border conditions. Artwork by each artist or collective is exhibited at both museums simultaneously, and thus visiting the entire exhibition requires crossing the border. Through its structure and site-specific installations, interactive works, videos, photographs, sculptures, and more, the Transborder Biennial 2018, which is accompanied by a biennial border guide designed by artists LosDos, prompts reflection on life in the border region, including issues of crossing, immigration, and physical, linguistic, and cultural hybridity.

Ester Partegàs is a visual artist and educator splitting her time between New York and Marfa, Texas.

Partegàs's sculptures, images and installations recreate mass-produced objects and generic public spaces – spaces characterized by the flow of commercial transactions, consumption, disposal and loss. Employing processes that entail direct contact with an original – casting, printing, copying and tracing – the works examine the most unassuming details of everyday life as a record of shared affective, social, political and metaphysical connections between people and things. Her work refocuses the familiar, proposing a space where the material and immaterial might coexist.

Partegàs's work has been shown nationally and internationally in venues such as the Sculpture Center, LIC, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, NY; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Arnolfini, Bristol; the Moscow, Athens and Busan Biennials; among others. She is represented by Foxy Production, New York; Christopher Grimes, Santa Monica, CA; and NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona/Madrid.

Partegàs has held teaching positions at the Sculpture Department of Yale University; at the Sculpture + Extended Media Department of the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA; at SUNY Purchase, NY; and at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. She is currently teaching at Parsons/ The New School in New York.