Trust Me

During her childhood, Muriel Hasbun’s father—a dentist—was asked to identify casualties of the Salvadoran civil war (1979–92) using eerie and outsize images of teeth, fillings, and other anatomical signatures to identify otherwise anonymous victims of violence. Hasbun rediscovered the dental X-rays decades later, after her father died, and rephotographed them to make the series X post facto (équis anónimo). The resulting new photographs offer intimate linkages to people we cannot see or know, revealing only what the artist calls “relics’’ or “traces” that have been “recorded in the flesh.” Markers of cultural identity, both hidden and overt, run through Hasbun’s work, gesturing to her father’s Palestinian origins, her mother’s Polish and French Jewish ancestry, and her own upbringing in El Salvador.