‘The magical phrase - there's no place like home - is ... doubly cryptic. "There's no place like home" means home is the best, the ideal, everything that elsewhere is not. Places elsewhere can never bring the same happiness as home. Alternately inflected, the phrase turns into its opposite. "There's no place like home" also means that no place, anywhere, is like home. Nowhere is there a place like home. Home is a never never land of dreams and desire. Home is utopia - a no place, a nowhere, an imaginary space longed for, always already lost in the very formation of the idea of home.’ (Stanford Friedman, Bodies on the Move: A Poetics of Home and Diaspora, 2004,192).

 What is home? What does it mean to belong somewhere? Is it a static place and concept, or a destination, is it a sense of self, a fleeting memory, a feeling, a liminal in-between space? What does it mean to lose one's home? What is the difference between ‘home’ and simply ‘address’?

In the upcoming exhibition There is No Place Like Home: Landscapes of Belonging, curated by Minna Etein, six female artists examine their relationships to the concept of ‘home’. Coming from different points of reference: feminist, migrant, queer; the artists explore what it means to have a home, to lose or leave home, to make a new home in a country other than one's origin. 

Conjuring memories, questioning how the perceptions are made, finding the sense of belonging in the liminal spaces.

Home as a hallway, as an in-between waiting space, a hang-out place, where one is free to exist outside the normative rules informed by societal institutions.

Walls, marks, old scars, wounds scratched into paint, history etched in these layers, visible and invisible, vibrating and sculpting time through memories.

Home as a post box with letters received in one's name, home as a memory of a song from one's childhood, a calling to return to the house at the first sign of darkness.

Home as a mobile construct, ever moving and receiving sounds, amplifying and sending out into the world, home as a place to share and connect communally, home as a desire to extend oneself to others, a desire to meet, to see and be seen, to understand each other, to link borders.

Artists:

Minna Etein

Kathrin Hippen

Arin Ismail

Monika Kita

Valery Osina

Chihiro Otsuka