To Whom It May Concern:
Safehouse 1
August 2023
Co-curator
Works by Amy Ken Chen, Bolim Jeon, Carina Q Tint , Jiuming Duan, Leonardo Eddé, Lin Wen-Ben, Xi Chen, Zhenyi Zheng, and Zijing Xia
Co-curated with Jiuming Duan
A single suspended moment, teetering and tottering, not really knowing which way to fall. It carries an immense weight, and yet weighs nothing at all. Around it as far as the eye can see is a great big nothingness, fluid and ambiguous, shifting and ebbing and flowing, both abundantly full and eerily empty. The moment holds its breath, almost ready to jump and let the great big nothingness swallow it whole and give it a new shape.
To Whom It May Concern: brings together 9 interdisciplinary artists as they introspect on this particular moment. Faced with precarious futures and prospects of leaving behind one home for another, each artist investigates themes of memory, love and mourning, the often absurd nature of existence itself. The artists share in a common experience of uprooting their lives to come to the UK, and each has faced their own struggles with the bureaucracy of the immigration process and the challenge of proving one’s right to call this place home.
The exhibition presents a wide range of mediums such as drawing, moving image, new media, sculpture, and installation and forms of storytelling such as theatre and cinema, all coming together within the restored ruins of Safehouse 1 – a previously abandoned Victorian house now repurposed as an exhibition and filmmaking venue. Safehouse 1’s energy and purpose now transforms with each of its temporary occupants. It finds itself now in this moment — housing this exhibition, and echoing its reflections on transience, loss, and potential new beginnings. To Whom It May Concern: thus brings these various elements together to explore the relationships, objects and experiences that shape each of our unique perceptions of home and the constantly shifting realities we find ourselves in.
Image Credits:
To Whom It May Concern: exhibition poster