COLLAGE ON VIEW
Dis/Placements: Revisitations of Home
at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina, USA
Online: 28 August-12 December 2020
At the Gallery: 17 September-20 November 2020
“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. The Institute believes these community participation elements, in addition to the commissioned responsive art pieces, will create a rich tableaux of connectedness in these times of social distance.
The project is funded in part by The Henry & Sylvia Yaschik Foundation. This program is sponsored by South Carolina Humanities.
(text adapted from the gallery’s press materials)
INFORMATION
Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art
at the College of Charleston
161 Calhoun Street
Charleston, South Carolina 29401 USA
(843) 953-4422
HOURS:
Thursday-Friday, 11AM-4PM
By appointment only: Monday-Wednesday.