White Columns Online #30:
Bricks of Memory, Fragments of Home
curated by Sanna Almajedi

Ruthie Abel
Mitsuko Brooks
Angela Cappetta
Anna Cone
Patricia Miranda

What defines a home? To some of us, it is a particular place where we grew up, an architectural space filled with comfort. To others, it is a memory or an idea of a place–more imagined than real. This is often true for immigrants and refugees around the world who have not stepped foot in their homeland in decades or only heard about it in stories passed along from their elders. Many Palestinians carry keys to the homes they were evicted from during the Nakba–as a symbol of hope and a belief in their eventual return. In the meantime, they build new homes and fill them with memorabilia, recipes from their homeland and a lot of imagination. In an Art21 segment, Michael Rakowitz reflects on how his Iraqi-Jewish grandparents, who immigrated to Long Island, were the first installation artists he ever met: “Everything that was on the floors was from Iraq, everything that was on the walls was from Iraq, and what was coming out of the kitchen was most definitely from Iraq.” This story resonates across communities who hold onto every bit of their culture as they integrate into a new society. It is particularly evident in New York where a different culture exists in a microcosm on every corner of each block. We can find bits and pieces of Puerto Rico in Angela Cappetta’s series Glendalis: The Life and World of a Young Latina, a series of photographs that stunningly document the life of a young girl growing up in the Lower East Side. Ruthie Abel’s work uses the news about migrants risking their life to cross Panama’s Darién Gap in the Wall Street Journal as her canvas. Mitsuko Brooks’ series M.A.P. (Mail Art Project) gathers writing, drawing and stamps, composing letters that will never be mailed out to people that don’t exist. Anna Cone’s installation For My Will is as Strong as Yours and My Kingdom as Great examines how our preserved spaces reveal what we choose to honor and remember. Her installation includes different thrifted extravagant objects and furniture pieces that have lived multiple lives and now exist in this fantasy room. One of the pieces is an old display fridge that, according to the artist, absorbs negative energy and demarcates a safe space for trauma recovery. Patricia Miranda’s sculptures are made of repurposed textile, sometimes found by the artist, and other times donated to her by family members along with stories about the different fabrics. Among the many things donated are aprons and napkins, things that have no real value aside from the stories that follow them. They are collectively sewn together, creating a huge skirt-like sculpture that, through care and precision, imagines the female body as a nurturing space where communities can shelter. Collectively, the works in this show use memory and fantasy to preserve and unveil secrets hidden in objects that make up what we call home, meticulously filling our lives with care and comfort. 

Sanna Almajedi (b. 1993, Baghdad) is a curator and writer based in New York. She currently serves as the Performance Curator at e-flux. Almajedi has curated performances at e-flux featuring Kevin Beasley, Basel Abbas, Tarek Atoui, Elizabeth Povinelli and Samia Halaby, among many others. In 2024, she curated Babel, an exhibition and performance series at SARA’S / Dunkunsthalle featuring works by Sam Anderson, Ali Eyal and Stipan Tadić, among others. She co-curated Publishing Against the Grain, an exhibition produced by Independent Curators International, which toured to Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Center for Contemporary Art Lagos, and multiple other institutions. In 2017, she was a curatorial fellow at the Vera List Center. Her work has been profiled by publications such as GQ, JustSmile and The Wire. Almajedi earned her MA in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts in 2017. 

This exhibition is the thirtieth in a series of online exhibitions curated exclusively from White Columns’ Curated Artist Registry.