Cat Gunn: 'if only by the light of a new moon'

Cat Gunn’s first solo museum exhibition, "if only by the light of a new moon," explores the complex terrain of inherited memory and the seemingly impossible nostalgia for a home one has never known — an experience familiar to immigrants, first-generation children, and anyone displaced by colonialism, war, or occupation.

Gunn’s mother, Lida, grew up in poverty in post-war Manila. In the late 1970s she met Richard, an American working as a Vietnamese linguist with the US Air Force. They married and settled in Baltimore, where Gunn was raised. Whether because of the language barrier, faulty memories, or a reluctance to speak of hard times, Lida’s story — and by extension Gunn’s own Filipino heritage — has remained largely inaccessible to them.

Developed during Gunn’s year-long residency at ICA San Diego in 2025, the exhibition dissects the mechanisms of collective forgetting that often erase colonial conquest and imperial violence, asking who controls these narratives and why crucial information often remains withheld. Its title evokes illumination that is only barely perceptible — a longing for even the faintest glimmer of hope or truth.

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