When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Art and Migration
By choice or by force. With great success or great struggle. People move or are uprooted, for many reasons. The world is currently witness to the highest levels of movement on record; the United Nations estimates that one out of every seven people is an international or internal migrant or refugee.
Borrowing its title from Somali-British poet Warsan Shire, “When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Art and Migration” highlights the diverse artistic responses to migration, ranging from personal stories to poetic meditations in a range of mediums. See how the global movement of people today through migration, immigration, and displacement has mobilized artists from more than a dozen countries to reimagine ideas of home and place. The exhibition includes more than 40 works by 21 artists, among them Kader Attia, Tania Bruguera, Mona Hatoum, Yinka Shonibare CBE, and Aliza Nisenbaum.
For its local presentation, Mia commissioned Twin Cities–based CarryOn Homes’ COH Living Room, 2020 and Postcommodity, based in the American Southwest, Let Us Pray for the Water Between Us, 2020 — artworks highlighting stories of home and the difficult journey of migrants. The exhibition also includes the U.S. premiere of Ai Weiwei’s Safe Passage. The installation comprises thousands of discarded lifejackets, worn by refugees making the dangerous sea journey from Turkey to Greece, to be installed on Mia’s exterior columns.
Mia is now closed, 2400 Third Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN. See artsmia.org for reopening dates.
