Dis/placements features ten artists whose works deal with issues of displacement from their ancestral homeland in various capacities. The artists have been drawn from the exhibition history of the Halsey Institute. Each artist was asked to submit works that speak most directly to their reminiscences of home. Artists were paired with writers who have offered their own reflections on the work and its relationship to the concepts of home and displacement. When taken together, this collection of work provides an opportunity to consider the traits and aspects that are both similar and jarringly disparate–from Asia to Africa, to Europe and the Middle East.
Ideas of home have taken on new meaning in this fraught moment of pandemic. For many, home has become a place to cocoon where hours run into days, weeks, and months. For people less fortunate, home can represent insecurity and be charged with fear; and for those on the frontlines of COVID-19 it may be a place newly tenuous, frequented for momentary respite at best.
As a formative dimension of the human condition, focus on home is a constant in the arts at scales from the family residence to the neighborhood to the homeland. Homelands are central to our collective imagining of our place in the world. For most of us most of the time, they can be taken for granted, celebrated periodically, before receding to form the backdrop against which life plays out. Made inaccessible or, worse, lost, they can be mythologized as places to be coveted, spied from afar, encountered, experienced, perhaps recovered if only ephemerally.
Over the course of fall 2020, Dis/placements: Revisitations of Home will consider these themes. The core of the project exists virtually, functioning as an online platform designed to reach greater audiences and encourage community participation. Throughout the fall, content will be added to this site to further enrich the project, including virtual conversations between artist-writer pairs, educational packets designed for classroom or in-home use, interactive phone and mapping activities, and responsive projects from students at the College of Charleston.
Learn more about the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art
Dis/placements: Revisitations of Home is funded in part by The Henry & Sylvia Yaschik Foundation and by South Carolina Humanities, a not for-profit organization; inspiring, engaging, and enriching South Carolinians with programs on literature, history, culture, and heritage.
DIS/PLACEMENTS
REVISITATIONS OF HOME
Ideas of home have taken on new meaning in this fraught moment of pandemic. For many, home has become a place to cocoon where hours run into days, weeks, and months. For people less fortunate, home can represent insecurity and be charged with fear; and for those on the frontlines of COVID19 it may be a place newly tenuous, frequented for momentary respite at best.
As a formative dimension of the human condition, focus on home is a constant in the arts at scales from the family residence to the neighborhood to the homeland. Homelands are central to our collective imagining of our place in the world. For most of us most of the time, they can be taken for granted, celebrated periodically, before receding to form the backdrop against which life plays out. Made inaccessible or, worse, lost, they can be mythologized as places to be coveted, spied from afar, encountered, experienced, perhaps recovered if only ephemerally.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
In the fall of 2020, the Halsey Institute will examine these shifting notions of home by creating a multimedia project called Dis/placements: Revisitations of Home. This project will feature 10 artists whose works deal with issues of displacement from their ancestral homeland in various capacities. The core of the project will exist in a virtual format on a custom website, functioning as an online platform designed to reach greater audiences and encourage participation and discussion. For each artist, the platform will feature 10-12 images of artwork, a response to their work from a guest writer, blog posts by Halsey Institute staff as well as faculty and students at the College of Charleston, educational packets, and other contextual measures. The Halsey Institute will also host several virtual events with these artists and other scholars and collaborators to further explore the theme of home.