Dis/placements: Revisitations of Home

In the fall of 2020, the Halsey Institute will examine the shifting notions of “home” through a multimedia project, Dis/placements: Revisitations of Home. This project will feature ten artists whose works deal with issues of displacement from their ancestral homeland in various capacities. All ten artists have been drawn from the exhibition history of the Halsey Institute.

The core of the project will exist in a virtual format, functioning as an online platform designed to reach greater audiences and encourage participation and discussion. For each artist, the platform will feature ten to twelve images of artwork, a response to their work from a guest writer, short videos featuring interviews with the artists, blog posts by Halsey Institute staff and faculty and students at the College of Charleston, educational packets, and other contextual measures. The Halsey Institute will also host several virtual events with the artists and other scholars and collaborators to further explore the theme of home.

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 battling COVID-19 it may be a place newly tenuous, visited 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. Home is central to our collective imagining of our place in the world. For most of us most of the time, it can be taken for granted, celebrated periodically, before receding to form the backdrop against which life plays out. Made inaccessible or, worse, lost, it can be mythologized as somewhere to be coveted, spied from afar, encountered, experienced, perhaps recovered, if only ephemerally.

Artists and their respondents include: Shimon Attie and Dr. Dale Rosengarten / Riccarda de Eccher and Bryan Granger / Lonnie Holley and Dr. Ted Rosengarten / Yaakov Israel and Dr. Mark Long / Hung Liu and Katie Hirsch / Jiha Moon and Lilly Wei / Dr. Fahamu Pecou and Ruth Rambo / Hamid Rahmanian and Mark Sloan / Tanja Softić and Dr. Marian Mazzone / Renée Stout and Dr. Ade Ofunniyin

The project is funded in part by The Henry & Sylvia Yaschik Foundation. This program is sponsored by South Carolina Humanities, a not for-profit organization; inspiring, engaging and enriching South Carolinians with programs on literature, history, culture and heritage.