From the curator:
Dear Viewer,
Welcome to the Politics of Home! Before we descend the spiral staircase that is this exhibition, let’s set a few things straight. First and foremost, Home is not easy to define. Ask anyone to share their personal concept of home and we guarantee their answer will not be a simple one. This may seem obvious, and of course this is something the Vacant Museum has acknowledged from the get-go, all the way back to our Call for Submissions, but what may not be as obvious is why Home, despite its complexity, is universal in its contradictory nature.
In the Politics of Home, The Vacant Museum has assembled the work of over 30 artists from around the world in an effort to point out the two sides of every coin, and the double edges of each sword which the idea of Home always seems to bring about. In this exhibition you will find moments of solace and strife and of hardship and harmony. Here you will find more than just a concept, you will find real issues and real stories. You will find a political conversation.
So there you have it, Home in all of its various forms is full of contradictions. Some are thought-provoking and some inspiring, though many are merely the result of or reasons for division and intolerance. The more we shine a light on them however, the more understandable the concept of Home becomes and the closer we come to understanding one another.
– S
Jessica Alazraki
New York, New York
Portraits of Latino Immigrants
http://www.jessicaalazrakiart.com
These paintings depict portraits of Latinx immigrants. Colorful patterned plastic tablecloths are used as a canvas. Integrated into the compositions, they serve as imagery, but also as a material metaphor. The theme of tables remind the viewer of shared experiences, and of humanizing an invisible community. The paintings are trimmed with a colorful border and hung unframed. The pieces insist on their roots and function as art of the people and carry a pictorial narrative. It is a process that references the tension between folk art and Western painting and is a useful metaphor for the duality of immigrant life.
Jiannan Wu
New York, New York
Country Love：That’s All Your Fault
https://www.instagram.com/jiannan_wu/
This work presents a scene of family meeting in a three-generation family in Northeast China. Some figures in the scene are classic characters from Northeast TV shows, and the objects and furnishings are all daily supplies with northeast characteristics, such as “kang”, warm pot, dishes and so on. This is one work of the “Country Love” series, which is a collection of color reliefs centered on the daily life of rural Northeast China. In this series, I use the language of sculpture to depict the “people” and “objects” of contemporary rural China. Through multiple angles, I present Northeast China’s pastoral culture, especially its new transformations and new social relations resulting from the collision between foreign pop culture and local traditional customs since the 1990s, as well as people’s arising anxiety toward the local and their identity. The work was first sculpted with polymer clay and baked into resin. Then I colored it with acrylic and framed it with wood. Finally, a LED light was installed into it. The relief format allows for a concentrated experience, the presentation of space, and engagement in an unfolding narrative. The work incorporates LED light projection to enhance dramatic tension and sculptural texture. The black shadow box, mounted like a picture, is not only a method and tool for the presentation of the work, but is also a part of the scene, guiding and limiting the vision of the viewer as if to see the world through the eyes of another, and it is even a symbol of “memory.” Unlike traditional three-dimensional sculpture, I play with compressed spatial volume to create an illusion. I spotlight the “people,” focusing on the shaping of each character’s personality and details. The scene is a stage, and each character has their own audience and world.
Alina-Ada Lungu
Bucharest, Romania
https://www.instagram.com/lungu_alina_ada/
My artistic approach starts from a careful analysis of forms and structures that are hidden or visible in reality. The subjects of my works are chosen from series of photos that are stored and I imagine for each of them a role that has to be accomplished in the compositional structure. My pictorial theme has a genuine support in the family archive. At first glance the audience cannot know for sure whether they are looking at photos of my family, but they are definitely family photos. I want to use the memory as an element of newness and to integrate it to the present and future. Thereby those combined elements activates each, taking on each other’s colours and meanings.
Jeremy Dennis
Shinnecock Indian Reservation in Southampton, New York
The Sacredness of Hills
On Monday, August 13th, 2018, skeleton remains were found during residential development on Hawthorne Road in the sacred Shinnecock Hills. The developers and homeowners contacted the Southampton Town and Suffolk County police department, who further desecrated the burial by digging out the remains.
The lack of empathy toward indigenous sacred sites and routine disturbances for the sake of evermore Hampton estates influenced the Hawthorne Series, which uses real estate developments as the site for addressing issues of preservation. In my personal efforts, I have stood with elders to protest the continued desecration of our sacred Shinnecock Hills, yet even as recent as December 2019, the local town of Southampton ignores development after offering to purchase a neighboring lot in our sacred lands. For us, there is a sacredness of hills that needs to be protected.
Photo: An unidentified woman in traditional Northeastern Woodland Regalia is seen lying on a pile of earth with housing development in the distance.
Dyamond Gordon
Los Angeles, California
Being Colored Is A Metaphysical Dilemma I Haven’t Conquered Yet
I have spent quite some time trying to understand the purpose of my existence. I find that, as I grow, the opportunities for self discovery are vast but constantly changing.
This constant change is made even more complicated by my existence in an extreme state of “otherism” after moving to the U.S.
The desire to reflect who I am, being black and female, is becoming more and more evident in my work and this series was the result of years of searching— of me finally making the decision to reflect me in my work. Literally. I have mastered many things in the short while I’ve been on this earth but, being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven’t conquered yet.
Kasia Ozga
France
Nothing to See Here
http://kasiaozga.com/portfolio/nothing-to-see-here/
http://instagram.com/KasiaOzgaArt
For the Nothing to See Here series of drawings, I sewed scenes of migrant border crossings in black thread on scraps of textiles leftover from the tents.
The sewn drawings depicts places of crossing as well as immigrant detention centers and camps housing Latin American immigrants in the US and African and Middle Eastern Migrants in Europe (particularly detention facilities involving child migrant detainees). The images themselves come from press photographs published in print and online. Some depict buildings that house migrants on a temporary or long-term basis, others feature anonymous individuals or groups of people. They are alternately visible and totally opaque, depending on the angle at which light hits the black-on-black thread drawings on fabric. The works relate to the politics of home by directly depicting the experiences of undocumented immigrants leaving one home in search of another. The series asks viewers who gets to decide where home is and why? Can home be anywhere, even a temporary camp with squalid conditions? Nothing to see here represents migrants in search of a home in the United States while also commenting on the current administration’s desire to keep these newcomers out of sight and out of mind.
Gita Meh
Iran
All That We Own Are Our Souls
29 years had passed since I last lived in Iran. During 29 years of migration, I was able to examine how identity is shaped by differences in language, gender, ethnicity and culture, desire, exile, solitude and freedom, allowing me to re-create my own experience of cross-cultural spaces.
Finally, in 2011 I came back to Iran, luggage filled with papers, files and memories of almost half of the globe. My mother was helping me un-pack the geographies, the languages, the many mountains, faces, cultures, brushes, and rolls of canvases, eyebrows and tongues which constituted my artistic past practices. Together, we looked at images of so many different kinds of “clouds” on my Apple laptop that, I realized I was home.
Oil, soil, dirt, dried leaf on canvas. This is an ongoing series of landscapes that turn into roads, roads which when followed become faces, faces become nests, birds singing love songs which soon transform into soil and into another face after another tree, after another eye, watching, rain drops, growing. I am Gita Meh a visual artist, a poet. A neighbor. Writer. Curator. Daughter. Sister. A lucky aunt. I was born in Tehran in 1963 and have moved packed and unpacked 145 times in my life, from continent to continent, country to country, neighborhood to neighborhood and city to village. I have migrated from East to West and again from West to East since 1983 to present day, Banou Sahra, Iran. I create thought provoking works coming from real experiences of my life that speaks, communicates and connects to my diverse audiences. My work strives to diminish neglect on all ends.
Andressa C. Monteiro
São Paulo, Brazil
A Home of My Own
http://www.instagram.com/id.acm
Photographing urban spaces and observing how people inhabit the streets have always been a very important political and aesthetic issues for me. Currently, in Brazil, São Paulo, more than 20 thousand people are homeless.
When I organized the set of these four images, I ended up dividing them into five perceptible elements: a bed, an empty lunch box, left in the corner of the door of a store, a suitcase, which was abandoned on a wall painted with the phrase: “Love even in the impossible”, and two images that I gathered in one: an empty chair and a bus message that says: “Have you existed today?”. In none of these images there’s a human presence, just abandoned objects. We see empty places with no identity, without effective bonds and built to be invisible. I wonder if, at some point, whoever lay in that makeshift bed, who ate the food in this lunch box, who used that suitcase or who sat in that chair made a non-space a place of belonging
I have always believed that material objects can bring soul, identity and memory to spaces. Even more so when public policy in my country has always been so absent and violent when it comes to providing decent housing for homeless people. So they have to build a home on their own terms.
With these images, I reflect my existence as a citizen and artist by seeing, in the smallest details, which marks people living in the streets leave wherever they pass. The human absence is a presence difficult to ignore. The symbol of the suitcase, that shows that everything can be fleeting, and the phrase “Love even in the impossible”, co-exist as visual components that make me imagine that, even in difficult situations, I can exercise my compassion in realizing how much privileged I am.
This is what I like to highlight when I think about the idea of home: yes, it’s an issue of politics, identity, safety, discrimination, environmentalism, a place encompassing both solace and hardship. For many, homeless people never existed and never will exist. So, these photos are, for me, a reminder that I must always demand a government that cares about these issues and changes the scenario of urban housing in Brazil.
Deborah Eve Alastra
Portland, Oregon
Diversity; from Portland to Paris
http://www.instagram.com/deborah_eve_alastra
Portland Oregon and other lovely unique urban cities is a bit of a two edge sword; while maintaining much of their wonderful eccentricities and open minded communities they are also gentrifying at a rapid rate, pushing out many long time locals from their homes in urban centers. Many cities (such as Portland Oregon) join in supporting immigrant / migrant rights and indigenous protection. While much of the world battles extremes from climate change, the Pacific Northwest of the USA is perhaps one of the safest and beautiful places to ‘be’ and for this I am grateful it is my home.
Marcela Reyes
Garland, Texas
Home is Nowhere Else But Right Here
Home Is Nowhere Else but Right Here, is a piece that encompasses some of these layers. It consists of 162 pounds ( my weight) of two different soils: soil I brought from my home in Monterrey, Nuevo León, México, and soil I got from my home in Garland, Texas. These both places have shaped my identity and hold significant importance in my life.
When entering the United States, people from Mexico need a visa. What many people do not understand is that it is very hard to get one; it is a process that takes months, even years for some. It is a privilege if you get once since so many are denied. Many people enter here without it because circumstances such as poverty and violence oblige them to leave
Now,to get a visa, you have to possess documents that show that you can afford to travel to the United States, documents such as paychecks, notarized work letter, school letters, your grades, your bank statements, and everything you owe (houses, cars, pets,etc.)Even if you possess all of these documents, there is a slim chance of getting a visa. You also have to sum up the time it takes to get it (taking time off work when most people cannot afford this, filling out applications, and going to interviews.)
Similar to this, to be able to bring soil into the United States, you need to apply for a permit that it also usually denied. I see this soil as my body, because similar to it, the soil moved from one country to another in a prohibited way. To be able to bring the soil, I packed it in medium size vacuum-sealed bags; this made it easier for me to hide the soil between my clothes and personal belongings. As I see the soil as if it was my body, moving from different places, different countries. I have kept in mind the performance part of it. Forcibly removing the soil from its place to be transported to a new one and the journey it did, hiding it between personal belongings until it was safe for it to emerge as one.
Now,to get a visa, you have to possess documents that show that you can afford to travel to the United States, documents such as paychecks, notarized work letter, school letters, your grades, your bank statements, and everything you owe (houses, cars, pets,etc.)Even if you possess all of these documents, there is a slim chance of getting a visa. You also have to sum up the time it takes to get it (taking time off work when most people cannot afford this, filling out applications, and going to interviews.)
Similar to this, to be able to bring soil into the United States, you need to apply for a permit that it also usually denied. I see this soil as my body, because similar to it, the soil moved from one country to another in a prohibited way. To be able to bring the soil, I packed it in medium size vacuum-sealed bags; this made it easier for me to hide the soil between my clothes and personal belongings. As I see the soil as if it was my body, moving from different places, different countries. I have kept in mind the performance part of it. Forcibly removing the soil from its place to be transported to a new one and the journey it did, hiding it between personal belongings until it was safe for it to emerge as one.
Now,to get a visa, you have to possess documents that show that you can afford to travel to the United States, documents such as paychecks, notarized work letter, school letters, your grades, your bank statements, and everything you owe (houses, cars, pets,etc.)Even if you possess all of these documents, there is a slim chance of getting a visa. You also have to sum up the time it takes to get it (taking time off work when most people cannot afford this, filling out applications, and going to interviews.)
Similar to this, to be able to bring soil into the United States, you need to apply for a permit that it also usually denied. I see this soil as my body, because similar to it, the soil moved from one country to another in a prohibited way. To be able to bring the soil, I packed it in medium size vacuum-sealed bags; this made it easier for me to hide the soil between my clothes and personal belongings. As I see the soil as if it was my body, moving from different places, different countries. I have kept in mind the performance part of it. Forcibly removing the soil from its place to be transported to a new one and the journey it did, hiding it between personal belongings until it was safe for it to emerge as one.
This soil is me, a mix of different cultures, forcibly removed from a place into another.
Michaela Nagyidaiová
London, the United Kingdom
Where the Wildflowers Grow
https://www.michaelanagyidaiova.com
During the Greek Civil War (1946-1949), thousands of families were separated from each other and their homeland. In a governmental effort that was allegedly implemented to ensure the safety of minors, children aged three to fourteen were evacuated to countries in Eastern Europe. They became isolated from their families and homes and once the war was over, some children were never repatriated to their native environments. Where the Wildflowers Grow portrays a place, in which the past continues to play a significant role in shaping its current state and atmosphere. This place is also the birthplace of a part of my family, which was forced to leave their home and never returned. The work is a journey through their homeland, showing the ongoing impact of an event that occurred more than seventy years ago. It documents a landscape that was both affected but also historically significant during the Greek Civil War. Voluntary and forced migrations took place from the site throughout and after the conflict, slowly causing the present-day village to be almost uninhabited. Delving into the history of the environment, showing the remnants of migrations and past conflicts, the project captures the complexity behind the notion of home.
Yehonatan Cohen
London
The Desert Generation
https://www.instagram.com/yehonatan_c/
As an Israeli citizen, I find myself in conflict as a person, proud of his identity and nationality but at the same time ashamed. Fateful decisions are taken by governments around the world and bring with them the weight of responsibility of carrying them on the shoulders of their citizens.
The following video shows my self-seeking in my love-hate relationship with my home, Israel. As the book of Exodus tells, the Israelites searched for the Holy Land for 40 years in the desert.
Mateo Vargas
Philadelphia
Memorias de Asimilación
https://www.instagram.com/_mateo_vargas/
This work is a short film I edited from 90’s era VHS footage shot by my father during my childhood. The film is a personal glimpse at the class/cultural divide of retaining your own identity as a Mexican immigrant while starting a new home and family life in the United States as well as a personal tone poem of memory and cross-cultural/racial otherness and assimilation being the child of an immigrant.
Nina Molloy
New York and Bangkok
Vanitas II
https://www.instagram.com/ninamolloyart/?hl=en
Growing up in Bangkok with my mother’s side of the family, I regularly partook in Buddhist rituals to venerate our deceased ancestors. My father is Christian and grew up in the U.S., and therefore has very different rituals. Nevertheless, the same Buddhist concept of impermanence can be found in the message of “Vanitas”: a category of still-life paintings that contain objects that metaphorically represent the transience of the trivial pleasures of life which will inevitably vanish with death. The painting contains objects I scavenged for in my parents home including a medical model of a skull, a universal symbol of death, books which represent knowledge and luxury, the silk which is an object of luxury, the sword which represents power and protection, and a photograph of my father as an infant representing birth and the passage of time.
These objects symbolize materiality but more importantly the intangible cultural and personal value embedded within them. They have been both shaped and informed my personal identity and the environment which I occupy, and considering them offers an understanding of how I negotiate the existence of two drastically different cultures within myself.
Nadja Kracunovic
Serbia
22 44
https://www.behance.net/nadjakracunovic
Roles are switching. Time brings change. Now, we are exactly halfway.
The video presents a
brief moment of mother’s monologue. She was confronting the fact that her only
child is an adult. At that moment she is 44 years old and her daughter is
exactly half her age. The fear which is present in this video has been becoming
stronger the older I get.
As a video art, it presents short documentation of the real moment in time
where my mother was honest about her emotions. On the other side, it is
performance because it was planned – I asked my mother to answer the questions
in front of the camera.
In this piece of work, I aim to explore the single mother-child relationship through formal, kind of forced method. These relationships usually have an over-connection that often resembles a “love affair” between parent and child. After more than two decades, it is time to ”break up”. It is very difficult and at the same time an interesting process.
Cat Kocses
Houston, TX
Let Me Know When You Get Home Safe
https://www.instagram.com/catkart/
Home is shaped largely by who you share it with. When you’re a kid, that’s usually your parents, and you have no control over that.
My real mom didn’t provide the safest or most stable home, and this collage represents the warmth and protection that I might have had with a different mother. I used the abrupt linear transitions to represent the fact that even the best parents are not perfect, but if the majority of the experiences are positive the overall memory is beautiful.
Jo Lauren
Mersea Island, Essex, England
Susie & Vic
http://www.jolaurenphotography.co.uk
This image explores the relationship between parent and child in their own home. It addresses what a sense of home can mean, considering the ‘heimlich’ (homely) and ‘unheimlich’ (unhomely) with reference to the depiction of a romanticised ‘home’ environment, presented with the intention of unsettling the viewer.
I have debated the existence of ‘collective memory’, and how perspective and perception both separate and unite us. Through further research, I am of the opinion that sense of place or home can never fully be captured within a photo. However, the photograph has the ability to evoke emotion and memories within the viewer, enabling them to apply their own sense of place and opinion of the home and human relationships.
Emma Bromley
Newcastle
in my fabricated sanctuary, i find solace.
https://www.instagram.com/emmabromleyart/
In nature time moves slowly. Plants move but at a slower pace to the world around them. I find solace in this slowness; it’s meditative; it allows me to think.
The plants in a greenhouse are nurtured, loved and restored; their home is where they thrive. This represents the way I feel about my sense of home. It reminds me that, though I have hard times, home for me is a constant.
My studio has also been a place solace for me. While struggling with my depression, I have immersed myself in producing work as a type of therapy. This work focuses on artificial places of life. Greenhouses create places of conservation. This idea of conserving rare and special species fascinates me. I use clear materials such as glass and plastic and this transparent background allows viewing from both sides, altering the way I paint. Exploring this material and method has completely changed my view of painting.
Epiphany Knedler
Greenville, NC
Adaptations
http://www.epiphanyknedler.com
adaptations is a self-portrait reflecting on changes in my personal life after moving across the country from South Dakota to North Carolina. Using childhood photos from a family vacation in South Dakota, there is a focus on memory and nostalgia. I sent postcards to myself, indicating a personal move across the country. These artifacts are meant to be held and experienced, evoking melancholy.
Frijke Coumans
Netherlands
Le paradis c’est ici
At the beginning this year I found the book ‘Slow Burn City’ by Rowan Moore in a second-hand bookstore in Antwerp. The way he writes about how gentrification is inextricably linked to degentrification has inspired me for this project. In my photoseries, I wanted to contrast capital with the transitory, by focusing on a variety of cities.
The first I photographed was Charleroi, a city just below Brussels that is not abandoned, but empty. Everywhere you can clearly see that what once was, no longer is. But it is precisely in the remains of the withdrawn capital in which a certain beauty seems to appear. After spending three days in Charleroi, I was so overwhelmed by everything I had seen that I decided to devote a project to the city itself.
The diverse photos I took in Charleroi became the guiding principles for my project. I named the process: Le paradis c’est ici. The title challenges to accept the city in its desolation and ugliness and forces to see the beauty that is hidden in it. Architecture is shaped by human emotions and desires, but then forms a new setting for other developments. The connection that seems to exist between the living and the lifeless evokes the necessity of photography with me: it is always incomplete, or only complete because of the lives around it.
Krista Dedrick Lai
Philadelphia, PA
Migration
http://www.kristadedricklai.com
This piece was made in 2019 at the height of press coverage of the migrant crisis. As the mother of a young child who is totally dependent on me I was shredded by the stories of separation and abuse. I lay awake at night trying to imagine anything I would not do to keep my child safe. I came up empty. During the daytime I had intrusive visions of marching across a desolate landscape, carrying my child in my arms, searching for a safe home for him… only to be met with human cruelty and terror. The coverage has slowed to a trickle but the crisis continues. Some day our nation will face a reckoning for what we allowed to happen on our watch.
Natalie Bradford
Kalamazoo, Michigan, U.S.A
When You’re Gone
https://www.instagram.com/natalie.bradford/
I explore the idea of place and what it means to me vis-à-vis familial relationships, memories, and the passage of time. I pull inspiration from family photo albums, dating back to when my mother, and her mother before her, were kids at our summer home in Northern Michigan.
My artistic process starts with identifying my sources; family photos that stand out to me, whether that be an interesting composition, color palette, or a personal connection to the image. I then make photocopies and intricately cut out the objects and people I want. Later, I arrange them into a new architecture/story, and transfer them onto a new piece of paper using lacquer thinner, a photo transfer chemical. It’s impossible to keep memories from getting mixed up and changing, especially as we age. Some memories become disorganized and unclear in our heads while others are forgotten completely. Meanwhile, some stay with us forever. By combining older photos with newer ones, such as when I was a kid, my prints generate an obscured and surreal timeline, creating an almost dream-like alternative narrative to the memories depicted. Basically, they are a creative, abstracted take on the “family photo”.
Mär Martinez
Orlando, FL
Teta
My current work continues to explore the subversive channels that women access power and autonomy. Power dynamics within the home are nuanced; the home is typically considered a “female” sphere because of the culturally enforced gender roles. Domesticity implies the female domain, but it can be a source of subversive power and many women from previous generations used it as a way to assert dominance within cultures that denied female social mobility. My Teta is a fiercely intelligent, independent and worldly woman that defied the limiting roles for Arab women of her generation, but values the home above all while still acting as an autonomous being. She believes the home is the center of both the individual’s and the family’s strength and well being, and takes pride in nurturing the domestic sphere while simultaneously being a citizen of the world. I admire her and the positive values she has instilled into three generations of Syrian people.
Maria Ylvisaker
Brooklyn, NY
What’s for Dinner?
https://www.mariaylvisaker.com
The food we eat at home doesn’t always make it to our social feeds, but it plays a part in how we see ourselves and the world around us. What’s For Dinner? is a collaborative project about food, memory, and home. I’m creating a series of risograph prints with stories collected from friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers. These memories are a snapshot of everyday moments in all the ways we experience them: happy, sad, banal, joyous, repetitive, unique. In one story, a daughter remembers eating as much burnt pizza as she could after seeing her mother cry at the sight of it. In another, an avid backpacker describes the special meals that fellow hikers have made, seemingly out of thin air, after long days on the trail. For her, home is outside. Many of the memories I’ve collected have elements of sentimentality and nostalgia as well as hardship or pain. The prints I make repeat and reimagine these stories in bright risograph colors, each individual print almost imperceptibly different from the last.
Mercedes Lewis
Texas
Freedom
This piece was inspired by Adinkra cloths from traditional Asante culture in Ghana. These cloths were used for funerary and religious purposes. They used color and symbolism to tell a story about someone’s life. This piece contains symbolism of West African culture that represent the concept of FREEDOM of African American people. Historically African Americans were enslaved from their original homes and were put in American a system where systematic oppression is not created for them to succeed. This piece tells a story about having Freedom in America where we call home.
Manuela Granziol
Varese, Italy
“Hayat” from the Series “Language as Home”
http://www.manuelagranziol.com
With this sculpture I would like to draw attention to the plight of Syrian children. Hayat is an Arabic name that means life. Hayat could be any ordinary girl in Syria, not so different from a little girl in the “West”. Before the civil war, she went to school, practiced her faith, played with her friends and went about the business of everyday life. Since then, her life has been turned upside down. She had to leave her home. Every day is a struggle to survive and she is growing up in a world filled with violence, danger and uncertainty.
The sculpture “Hayat” is part of the series “Language as Home” where I explore how the different languages we come into contact during our life influence our own identity and self-perception. The movement of people from one home to another for different purposes, such as conflicts, natural disasters, employment or education, effects the way we relate to our mother tongue, which is often like the skin, unconditionally present and so easily injured.
The encounter with a new language is a decisive experience and make us realise that the world looks different in another language than it does in our own one. As writer Herta Mueller suggests “behind every language there are other eyes”. This allows the discovery of a linguistic universe different from the native inherited linguistic space. The mother tongue ceases to be the measure of all things as its view is continuously confronted with the “seen differently” of the other language/s. This divergence between words and things then creates a space between languages, which becomes a metaphor for a fragmented identity.
When you leave your homeland you also leave behind the comfort of the so well known mother tongue. Is moving into a different linguistic space an enrichment? Is it threatening? What are the implications if your mother tongue is the language of the enemy, or the language of uprooted and unwanted?
Karin Jolly
London, UK
SUPPORT
This feminised structural piece reflects the notion of the undermined, unappreciated supporting role of mothers at home within the fabric of society and the structure of the home. Restricted and unable to do its job to its full potential because of its placement.
The structure has been cut into lace, The pattern, a contemporary take on traditional Victorian doilies, a classic aesthetic example of the traditional homemaker
The overall piece A feminised nod to minimalist sculptors such as Richard Serra and Donald Judd.
Chinedu Chidebe
Enugu, Nigeria
The Cardinal
http://www.instagram.com/chidebe.chinedu.art
Inspired by the issue of gender inequality. This pencil drawing portrays the female as sad and determined in a society where females are being seen as people who has nothing to offer to the society regardless of how hardworking and strong they are, as seen in the recent times; like in the east part of Nigeria were I’m familiar with, women suffer from a lot of things.
Naomi Middelmann
Switzerland
Transient Landmarks
http://www.naomimiddelmann.com
Maps of places lived and imagined, photos found in Berlin mixed with family photos assembled into an artwork. My work deals with the question of memory and how as an immigrant the memory of place is assembled and disassembled only to be reassembled again to form a sense of transient landmarks.
Judy Isaksen
Winston-Salem, NC, USA
We Are All Caged
http://instagram.com/judy.isaksen/
The politics of home stretch across the walls of our living rooms, our hearts, and our nations. I sadly face the tragic truth that in North America’s current historical moment, our homes are extremely fragile; we are all caged in. This piece of art depicts that both our brown neighbors from the South as well as all Americans are caged in due to the immoral and racist policies of the Trump administration. And yet, this little boy is upright; he is clutching his dolls, which gives him comfort and allows him to get through. This clutching parallels all of us who use whatever we can to get by
Chau Nguyen
Philadelphia
Human Aquarium
Human Aquarium (2019) is a series of narrative paintings that convey conflict in domestic spaces. Water figures prominently in the work – a catalyst for both sublimity and confinement. The ebb and flow of this ever-present component symbolizes life itself: That it goes on, even during difficult moments. My personal conflict stays just beneath the painted surface, inviting further inspection.