Where Do We Migrate To?

The Exhibition

Curated by Niels Van Tomme and organized with the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, Where Do We Migrate To? explores contemporary issues of migration as well as experiences of displacement and exile. Situating the contemporary individual in a world of advanced globalization, the artworks address how a multiplicity of migratory encounters demand an increasingly complex understanding of the human condition. As such, the exhibition allows multiple perspectives about its subject matter to unfold simultaneously, opening up a range of political, psychological, poetic, and pragmatic manifestations of the contemporary migrant experience.

Where Do We Migrate To? features the work of nineteen internationally recognized artists and collectives, including: Acconci Studio, Svetlana Boym, Blane De St. Croix, Lara Dhondt, Brendan Fernandes, Claire Fontaine, Nicole Franchy, Andrea Geyer, Isola and Norzi, Kimsooja, Pedro Lasch, Adrian Piper, Raqs Media Collective, Société Réaliste, Julika Rudelius, Xaviera Simmons, Fereshteh Toosi, Philippe Vandenberg, and Eric Van Hove.

A national tour is currently being organized through November 2013.

The Film Series

This film program, curated by Sonja Simonyi and presented in partnership with the Film and Media Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University, presents a series of audiovisual materials, feature length fiction films, documentaries, as well as experimental videos. The selected films demonstrate the diverging ways in which networks of migration, experiences of displacement, and questions of belonging and rootlessness have been addressed by artist and filmmakers in recent years. While a selection of films engage with migratory practices as central to our understanding of the present-day self in increasingly globalized and multicultural settings, other works investigate the complex historical processes that frame these contemporary conditions. The program thus provides a rich sampling of ways in which the ongoing circulation of people across regions, nations and continents, is addressed and questioned from multiple political, social, cultural and historical perspectives in film and video art.

The project was made possible, in part, with the support of the Flemish Government through Flanders House.
Additional support for the exhibition and educational outreach programs comes from the Baltimore County Commission on Arts and Sciences.