Home, 2016
Installation view 
The Silos, Auckland Festival of Photography, 2016
Curated by Simone Douglas

Featuring the work of: Lin+Lam, Arthur Ou, Shan Turner-Carroll, Ian Strange, Sean Lowry, Shoufay Dertz, Anna Carey,  Eva Marosy-Weide.

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What is home? comes to us in a slow burn of revelation in the hands of the artists in this exhibition. The artists, each connected to the Australasia Pacific Region look at assumptions of home as a given. Questions of where we come from? and, how long have we been here? so pertinent to our region, are palpably raised in the artists’ photographic works.

 

For some of the artists, they never came from - they were always here. Home as spirit. Home as land. For others their family was forced away from ancestral homelands and set adrift, hoping to find refuge and acceptance in lands new to them. Home as hope. Photographs of home past carried forward into new homes, reveal photography’s paradoxical relationship with time. Home as return. Many of us within our region draw from multiple bloodlines. Home as heritage.

 

In other artists work, the disquiet of the suburban home where ‘all is well’ slowly dissipates into states of angst, into the DNA of our suburban dream. Houses lit up like cruise ships, houses constructed from memory. Doorsteps from which every one has departed, doorsteps at which no one can arrive.

 

It is a significant human experience to know home, and these artists powerfully suggest that home is not a fixed experience. Rather home is a shape shifter revealed through time, culture, and politics.

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Simone Douglas, Curator, New York, United States

 

Festival catalogue: https://issuu.com/aklphotofest/docs/2016_7b5b425219db04

Simone Douglas, Curator, New York

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