New exhibitions at ICA/Boston

When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art
October 23, 2019–January 26, 2020
When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art considers how contemporary artists are responding to the migration, immigration, and displacement of peoples today. We are currently witnessing the highest levels of movement on record—the United Nations estimates that one out of every seven people in the world is an international or internal migrant who moves by choice or by force. When Home Won’t Let You Stay borrows its title from a poem by Warsan Shire, a Somali-British poet who gives voice to the experiences of refugees. Through artworks made since 2000 by twenty artists from more than a dozen countries, this exhibition highlights diverse artistic responses to migration ranging from personal accounts to poetic meditations. Artists in the exhibition include Kader Attia, Tania Bruguera, Isaac Julien, Hayv Kahraman, Reena Saini Kallat, Richard Mosse, Carlos Motta, Yinka Shonibare CBE, Xaviera Simmons, and Do-Ho Suh, among others. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with an essay by Ruth Erickson and Eva Respini and texts by prominent scholars Aruna D’Souza, Okwui Enwezor, Thomas Keenan, Peggy Levitt, and Uday Singh Mehta. This exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator, and Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Ellen Tani, Assistant Curator, and Anni Pullagura, Curatorial Fellow.

Tschabalala Self: Out of Body
January 20–July 5, 2020
Tschabalala Self (b. 1990 in Harlem, New York) creates large-scale figurative paintings that integrate hand-printed and found textiles, drawing, printmaking, sewing, and collage techniques to tell stories of urban life, the body, and humanity. The artist’s first Boston presentation—and her largest exhibition to date—will include a selection of paintings and sculptures that represent personal avatars, couplings, and everyday social exchanges inspired by urban life. Together, they articulate new expressions of embodiment and humanity through the exaggerated forms and exuberant textures of the human figure, pointing to its limitless capacity to represent imagined states, memories, aspirations, and emotions. Yet Self’s characters possess an ordinary grace grounded in reality: they are reflections of the artist or people she can imagine meeting in Harlem, her hometown. This exhibition is organized by Ellen Tani, Assistant Curator.

Carolina Caycedo
January 20–July 5, 2020
The interdisciplinary practice of Los Angeles–based artist Carolina Caycedo (b. 1978, London) is grounded in vital questions related to asymmetrical power relations, dispossession, extraction, and environmental justice. Since 2012, Caycedo’s ongoing project Be Dammed has examined the wide-reaching impacts of dams built along waterways, particularly those in Latin American countries such as Brazil or Colombia (where she was raised and frequently returns). At the ICA, Caycedo will present the culmination of her Cosmotarrayas, a series of hanging sculptures assembled with handmade fishing nets and other objects collected during field research in different riverine communities affected by the privatization of waterways. These objects demonstrate the meaningful connectivity and exchange at the heart of Caycedo’s practice, as many of the nets and other objects were entrusted to her by individuals no longer able to use them. At the same time, they also represent the dispossession of these individuals and their continued resistance to corporations and governments seeking to control the flow of water and thus their way of life. This exhibition is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator and Publications Manager.