Collectable

What does ‘being at home’ mean?

Ahlam Shibli and Sigalit Landau: The art of building bridges in a broken world

work

Ahlam Shibli, 2007, Dependence no. 20 Ms. Eugenia, from Argentina, Sweeping the Sitting Room of her Employers Ms. Pilar Morales Vila and Mr. Oleguer Galí Figueras, with Them around her. Carrer Doctor Roux, Sarrià, Barcelona, 27.7.2007

When we ask the question ‘What does “being at home” mean?’, we are also asking ‘What does “not being at home” mean?’ And this is precisely what Ahlam Shibli and Sigalit Landau convey in their artistic practices. Despite their differences (Shibli was born in Palestine in 1970 and Landau in Israel in 1969), their work addresses the inseparable confluence of biography, territory and politics. Both these artists see home, not in a restricted, conventional way, but rather as an idea that spreads and expands in multiple directions: toward a national programme, toward the anguish of being deprived of one’s family, toward colonial dispossession and toward the performativity of the body as home. ‘I think my home is my studio. I don’t find freedom outside,’ says Ahlam Shibli in an interview for MACBA. To which Sigalit Landau adds: ‘My work is about building bridges.’ As Judith Butler writes in Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence: ‘For representation to convey the human, then, representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure.’ Listen to the interviews or read the catalogues here.