White Columns Online #37:
unhomely
curated by Grace Sanabria

Fabi F
Fadl Fakhouri
Kathleen Granados
Dean Majd
Mariel Rolwing Montes
Julie Oh
Anam Rani

unhomely

Home is a space typically regarded as a sanctuary, intended for protection, full of comforts and the deeply private. The works in the exhibition present familiar objects that are reevaluated, repurposed, and distorted to complicate our understanding of the home site. Drawing on Homi K. Bhaba’s theory of the unhomely, ubiquitous items are at once ontological and alienating, bearing personal traces of life recontextualized to the precipice of discomfort. Universal and intimate, the fragments of home become charged with the aggregate of lives lived amongst them, holding the disparate sentiments that inhabit our dwellings. 

An intricately carved headboard teeters precariously on a slab of porcelain bath tile in Anam Rani’s Queer Sandwich, (2026). A site of comfort and rest intersects with a sterile white field of cleanliness, leaving us to wonder what is at risk of being lost down the drain. Taped out on the gallery wall, Fadl Fakhouri’s Home (2022) is an impossibly entered door. A doorknob and peephole give the illusion of authenticity to the unhinged, immovable portal and on the floor, a key is rigged on a set mousetrap, an obstacle with dangerous repercussions and no possibility for success. Fakhouri’s false door draws on issues of displacement and who is granted the privilege of home. In Fabi F’s paintings of interiors, vacant corners and barren walls are illuminated with refracted light or cast in spectral shadow, signaling the passage of time and calling attention to the humble backdrops that bear witness to life’s fleeting moments. Through the vacuity of Dean Majd’s empty beds at the halfway house (2023) signs of life emerge. Though devoid of figures, presence is felt in the wrinkled impressions of bodies on bed sheets, the collection of books waiting to be read, and the crooked lampshade knocked ajar from the switch on and off of light. Illuminated in a delicate wash of natural light, the objects in the room emphasize the persistence of the personal in this provisional space. 

In Mariel Rolwing Montes’s Dollhouse (2024) a toy home is rendered in airbrushed tones of purple and pink. The hazy effect of Rolwing Montes’s paint application and the distortion of the image stretched across a disproportionately wide canvas turn this symbol of play and make-believe into a haunting mirage. A white dish towel emblazoned with bright red and pink flowers converges with a towel of a comparably vibrant red in Kathleen Granados’s Left Unsaid (2026). Embedded within the nap of terry cloth, the outline of a small spoon emerges, arrested beneath the fibers. The amalgamated kitchenwares feel both utilitarian and cherished, reverberating with the memories these domestic objects hold. Julie Oh fuses disparate forms in Grand Opening (2024). A sleek blue ribbon adorned with the white letters of the titular text is unspooled from a toilet paper dispenser. The contrast of this advertisement for something shiny and new situated as a tool for bodily hygiene is simultaneously sardonic and uncanny. The ribbon limply spills onto the floor, fatigued.

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

Grace Sanabria is an art historian and curator based in New York, NY. She holds a BA in Art and the History of Art and Visual Culture from UC Santa Cruz and is completing an MA in Art History at Hunter College. She currently works as an Associate Director at 47 Canal.