From the press release:
New Franklin Street Works exhibition tackles the pressing issues of nation, place, home and belonging in a moment of crisis as more people are displaced than any time since World War II.
The exhibition is on view January 20 through May 13, 2018 and opens with a free, public reception Saturday, January 27, 5:00-8:00 pm. In this place where the guest rests is accompanied by free, public educational programs that include artists talks by Divya Mehra at UConn-Stamford and Sherry Millner at Franklin Street Works, as well as curator-led reading groups.
“The exhibition was inspired, in part, by the Stamford, Conn. witch trials and the paradox of the ordeal: the “innocent” would drown and the “guilty” would float only to be punished for their alleged crimes,” says Franklin Street Works Creative Director Terri C. Smith. “Here and now, there are, arguably, echos of a similar double bind: forced from their homeland by war and poverty, refugees cross the Mediterranean Sea in terrible conditions via unseaworthy vessels. Those who drown are represented in the media as tragic victims, but those who survive the journey are framed as burdensome, unwanted interlopers.”
In this place where the guest rests presents works that touch upon vehicles of displacement — war, economics, colonialism and settler colonialism, white supremacy — and what is left in their wake. The works of Ken Gonzales Day, Brendan Fernandes and Jumana Manna allude to memory and its representation, histories that are told, and who has the right to tell them. Yael Bartana and Tanya Lukin Linklater’s works suggest the temporality of displacement as being simultaneously of the past and the future. Christina Battle and Sherry Millner appropriate images from visual culture to throw the realities of displaced people and hegemonic power into stark relief. Works by Addie Wagenknecht and Daniel R. Small touch on economic displacement on personal and global scales.
“I want visitors to the exhibition to consider their position in relation to the issues in the work,” said curator Jacqueline Mabey. “I’ve placed Divya Mehra’s work There are Greater Tragedies on the Franklin Street Works flagpole, greeting visitors with the text, ‘MY ARRIVAL IS YOUR UNDOING,’ to ask the question: Do you see yourself as the stranger who arrives, the host waiting at the door, undone, or both?”
In this place where the guest rests presents works in a variety of media by 10 international artists: Yael Bartana, Christina Battle, Brendan Fernandes, Ken Gonzales-Day, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Jumana Manna, Divya Mehra, Sherry Millner, Daniel R. Small, and Addie Wagenknecht.
“These artists’ works show that home is not a neutral or self-evident concept,” Smith says, “but something we enact, contest, and carry around with us.”
This exhibition is made possible by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and in-kind support from Purdue Pharma L.P.
http://www.franklinstreetworks.org/exhibition/in-this-place-where-the-guest-rests/