EL PASO, Texas, and CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – Walk too quickly past the sculpture – a slender bar of brass suspended in a clear display case – and you might not notice that this work of art is wearable. With a post at either end, the delicate piece of metal is a single earring, designed to be worn by two people.

The work, “Bad” Hyphens Separate; “Good” Hyphens Attach, made its debut in 2024’s Border Biennial, a collaborative exhibition organised by two museums on either side of the US-Mexico border: the El Paso Museum of Art in Texas and the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juarez.

In June, the artist behind the work, Haydee Alonso, will stage a performance at the El Paso museum in which two women will wear the earring and walk, tethered together, through the exhibition.

“What I want is to create this kind of nervousness or tension,” Alonso said. “Because if one doesn’t walk in sync or isn’t balanced, something is going to happen. Something is going to break.”

For the artist, who grew up commuting from her home in Juarez to schools in El Paso, the piece is a metaphor for the relationship between the two cities. As the title suggests, borders can be barriers or bridges. Here, the reality is often both.

This year’s Border Biennial was the first in six years because of pandemic-era border closures and other issues, and the sixth since 2008. Although the exhibition was originally set to close on April 14, and the portion in Juarez did conclude on schedule, Mr Edward Hayes, director of the El Paso museum, has extended the show there by reinstalling select works. This new version, which features 22 works from the original exhibition, will be up till Aug 11 inclusive.

Since its inception, the biennial has captured the fraught history of the region, as well as the subtleties that tend to get lost in news reports on its more recent challenges.

El Paso and Juarez were one city until 1848, when the Rio Grande rushing through town became the dividing line between the United States and Mexico. Today, what is left of the river – a shallow, murky stream – flows through concrete channels under a 9m stockade of rusted steel bollards on the northern bank.

Over the past few years, thousands of migrants seeking asylum have lined up along this wall, waiting to be processed by the US Border Patrol before entering El Paso.

In December, when a large number of new arrivals overwhelmed the local shelter system, the encampments that formed on city streets in frigid weather attracted widespread coverage.

In March, hundreds of people broke through concertina wire barriers along the Rio Grande, some clashing with members of the Texas National Guard.

Every day seems to bring another story about a historically welcoming city on the brink of chaos.

“Just seeing the sensational headlines about the migrant crisis, it appears that El Paso is on fire all the time,” Mr Hayes said. “I think what the Border Biennial does is that it helps you get past that layer of sensational, polarising coverage into something a lot more relatable, more human and multifaceted.”

When I visited the two museums in February, the range of works was dizzying. Textiles and photographs hung near ceramics, abstract prints, realist paintings, assemblages and videos. Some works were earnest, others ironic. The sometimes bewildering contrasts were apt reflections of the area’s complexities and contradictions.

“We don’t all come from the same place, we don’t all have the same experience, and that’s why I think the Border Biennial is such an important exhibition,” said Alonso, the maker of the long earring, a slight woman with Bettie Page bangs and a septum piercing. “It has all these different voices.”

Even the 22 works in the trimmed version at the El Paso museum speak to a broad range of perspectives. Several artists address the region’s most notorious issues, from the kidnappings and killings associated with cartel warfare in Juarez to the plight of migrants who attempt to enter Arizona through the Sonoran Desert.

Artist Nereida Dusten channels the stories of deportation common in Playas de Rosarito, a coastal city near Tijuana, Mexico, into small collages as striking as they are spare.

In Delimitation Of A Landscape III (2023), a man cut from a vintage photograph stands, head bent, below snarls of red thread reminiscent of razor wire. Dusten has a friend illegally in the US who has been living in constant dread of deportation for nearly 30 years.

“He wouldn’t know what to do if he goes back to Mexico,” she said in a phone interview from Mexico. “He doesn’t know how to live here, how life works here.” Perhaps those tangled loops are tortured thoughts made visible.

“This is an extremely political show,” said Mr Edgar Picazo Merino, one of the show’s curators and a founding director of Azul Arena gallery in Juarez. “The only difference is that it’s not in your face.”

Ms Claudia Preza, assistant curator at the El Paso museum, who led this year’s curatorial team (which also included Ms Jazmin Ontiveros Harvey, an artist and film-maker based in Albuquerque, New Mexico), said she was looking for artists who were “stepping beyond stereotypes” as she reviewed the 270 submissions from artists born or based on both sides of the border, from the Pacific coast to the Gulf of Mexico. Ultimately, Ms Preza and her collaborators selected 173 works by 51 artists and collectives.

Some of the most magnetic pieces – which will remain on view in El Paso – illuminate largely unreported experiences of the border. Andres Payan Estrada, who grew up in Juarez and El Paso, photographs the floors of local gay bars and transforms them into jacquard tapestries where plastic cups, cigarette butts and debris form oddly beautiful black and silver landscapes. He sees parallels between the queer nightlife spaces where he was able to try on different selves as a young man and the border region, which he said “really mishmashes identity and nationalism and language”.

Eric Manuel Santoscoy-Mckillip, an El Paso native, lives in New York City now, but the inspiration for his work – vivid paintings composed of interlocking geometric forms with coarse stucco surfaces – comes from the desert landscape (for instance, he said, “the way in which a cactus can look neon at night when it blossoms”) and the vernacular architecture of the South-west.

For the people who live in El Paso and Juarez, the border is not a stage for political grandstanding. It is the stuff of family histories, childhood memories and daily commutes.

One 2019 study, conducted by community foundations in El Paso and Juarez in conjunction with the University of Texas at El Paso, found that 47.6 per cent of El Pasoans surveyed grew up in Mexico. According to US Customs and Border Protection, more than 1,000 students from Juarez cross the border daily to go to school.

When I stepped onto the caged pedestrian path of the Paso Del Norte Bridge one afternoon, I joined a stream of children with backpacks.

The Border Biennial seeks to capture this fluidity. Although there have been other transborder art programmes, the Border Biennial is a rare, recurring exhibition between government museums in different countries. The El Paso Museum is run by the city; the museum in Juarez is a federal museum managed by Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts.

“This is a blue county in a very red state,” said Mr Ben Fyffe, El Paso’s managing director, quality of life. “Sometimes that has ramifications for funding and resources.”

Surrounded by mountains and desert, El Paso is more than eight hours by car from Austin, Houston and Dallas. When it comes to arts and culture, the city’s attitude has been “nobody else is going to come in and do this for us. Let’s do it ourselves”, Mr Fyffe said.

This sense of self-reliance underscores the Border Biennial, where artists seek to tell their own stories about a widely discussed but often misunderstood region.

“If you don’t experience the border and if you don’t live around the border, you assume that the things that you read in the media are true,” Alonso said.

She senses, however, that outsiders are increasingly “eager to understand the border in a different way”. The feeling is mutual. “We are hungry for that too,” she said. NYTIMES