Thursday night was overshadowed by the gala opening for Made in Palestine (see my earlier post), but I did see some other shows that night. One that ties in well with the Palestinian show is home/away, by Heike Liss, at the CUE Art Foundation.
The color photographs by this German artist are portraits of forgettable places, and were taken in the course of her travels. Her artist’s statement reads “home/away asks to what extent do we define ourselves in relation to ‘home’; the work examines what that definition means in a world where so many individuals do not live where they were born.”
Wow. Now, even an art history professor couldn’t have stumbled on a more fortuitous correlation with the Palestine show and its theme of displacement. The idea of home, especially for those of us who live quite a distance from where we were born, is endlessly interesting. Why? Because when you have to recreate your home in a different country, you are continually approximating and adjusting. Nothing escapes examination. And the smallest details count. Liss focuses on those banal details as if to commit them to memory – as if to say, you don’t have to fixate on them, I’ve recorded them.
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