White Columns Online #24:
Dwelling 
curated by Mihaela Chiriac

Tania Alvarez
Allen Golder Mullin Carpenter
Jorian Charlton
Fabio de Faria
Ana De La Cueva
Madeline Djerejian
Jonathan Ehrenberg
Josh J Feigin
Kathleen Granados
Amanda C. Mathis
Pol Morton
Steve Oliver

Browsing through the images from the Artist Registry, I came across a multitude of representations and takes on the mundane. It was not only thoughts around domesticity and interiority that these works evoked, topics that we’ve all been confronted with intensely over the past two or three pandemic years. While looking, something more fundamental revealed itself in this simple, banal reminder: regardless of technological development, of the speed that determines our lives, of geographical, cultural and other differences, the need for shelter and dwelling remains inseparable from human existence. It is one of the defining features of the human condition. One’s shell, the body one inhabits, is soft and vulnerable and in perpetual need of protection.

My search increasingly focused on representations that map the semantic field of the words “dwelling” and “home.“ This reminded me of my first encounter with Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical thought. I came across it some time ago, while researching Chantal Akerman’s films. Akerman’s entire cinematic oeuvre, as well as her writing, deals with notions of belonging and homelessness. The Belgian filmmaker was particularly interested in Levinas’s assertion that the human face as an expression of the Other ordains one’s own humanity. This idea became crucial to Akerman’s conception of cinema, which oscillated between documentary and fiction, and specifically to the manner in which she framed her shots. In his writings, Levinas aims at an empathetic and ethical understanding of the world and the Other. He establishes an inseparable link between the meanings of “dwelling” and the realization of our humanity. Levinas refers both to dwelling as the space that provides shelter and to the act of dwelling in one’s own body, in a home and in the world. In Levinas’s view, the body has a paradoxical character. Its neediness makes it experience discomforts, but it also has the resources to overcome these hardships through appropriate actions. Similarly, the term “home” holds a double implication: while it offers protection, it also hints at the vulnerability and fragility of human beings.

Following these lines of thought, the works I have selected for this online presentation explore positive and negative spaces that might be called or derived from “home” and “dwelling,” be they domestic interiors, imaginary architectures, borders between countries, territories deprived of shelter, mental spaces, retreats for rituals of self-care, places for daydreams and obsessions. As Gaston Bachelard put it so beautifully in his book The Poetics of Space,“all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home. […] imagination functions in this direction whenever the human being has found the slightest shelter: we shall see the imagination build ‘walls’ of impalpable shadows, comfort itself with the illusion of protection or, just the contrary, tremble behind thick walls, mistrust the staunchest ramparts. In short, in the most interminable of dialectics, the sheltered being gives perceptible limits to [their] shelter. [They experience] the house in its reality and in its virtuality, by means of thought and dreams. […] Through dreams, the various dwelling-places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days” (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, 1994, p.5.)

Mihaela Chiriac is a curator living and working in Berlin, Germany. She is co-founder of STATIONS, a space for contemporary art, debates and collaborations (www.stations.zone).

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

Jonathan Ehrenberg
Bad Tools
,  2016
Video
2:37 min
Courtesy of the artist

Madeline Djerejian
decima campesina (excerpt)
Video
2:35 min
Courtesy of the artist