Itinerant Belongings

Slought, the History of Art and the Fine Arts Department at the University of Pennsylvania are pleased to announce "Itinerant Belongings," an exhibition on display from November 1, 2014 to December 20, 2014. An opening reception will take place on the evening of Saturday, November 1st from 6:30-8:30pm (more information forthcoming).

How are the politics of public space informed by the supposedly intimate and private domains of fantasy and family? Do concepts like homeland and homecoming promote a desire for wholeness that conceals the exclusion of otherness? How do senses of relation arise in unsettled modes of orientation, such as errantry or nomadism? "Itinerant Belongings" examines how artists have engaged with ideas of homeland and belonging that fail to cohere to a unitary sense of time or place. Through film, photography and performance, the artists in this exhibition explore the contours of belonging across different contexts - from the invention of nationalist social rituals to the homecoming of veterans, from the trope of the "haunted" house to that of the family portrait. By bringing together the work of an international group of artists approaching home as a volatile concept, this exhibition examines how fantasies of belonging involve complex psychic and affective responses to specific material and historical conditions informed by race, gender, sexuality and class.

"Itinerant Belongings" grounds this inquiry by revisiting critical debates that bridged activism and art in the 1980s and 1990s. Responding to the presence of the homeless, the displaced, and the disenfranchised in American cities, two of the artists in the exhibition, William Pope.L and Krzysztof Wodiczko, produced projects in this critical moment that questioned the very notion of what it meant for a space to be "public." This exhibition aims to reanimate this dialogue and extend it to a contemporary global landscape marked by mass displacement, armed conflict, and debates around borders and immigration.

Work by Yael Bartana, Jamie Diamond, Andrew Moore, William Pope.L, Jessica Vaughn, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Krzysztof Wodiczko will be on display at Slought and the Addams Gallery at PennDesign, and viewers are encouraged to take an itinerant path from one exhibition site to another.

https://slought.org/resources/itinerant_belongings