What is home?
Perhaps a place, a setting, an abode, a country, a religion, a political viewpoint, a time in one’s history, an emotional touchstone, a representation of self.

To come home.
But where does home originate? And how does one construct home, physically?
Psychologically?

To feel at home.
Yet, where is that emotional response, that understanding of place and self within it, localized? How is it accessed? Maintained? Sustained? Modified?

To be home, in a space where one is expected to be secure.
To see oneself as situated, within a domestic space, or a land of one’s identity, where there is perhaps comfort in the understanding that this is a place to be oneself.

These are all statements we make regarding what is often considered a representation of home. A space, person, setting, community, family, country, origin, land, or a moment of time, where there is expected to be a feeling of personal, situational, and physical safety. Where there is a secure foundation for the awareness of self. Where one can readily have a space that sits at the center, a site of identification, with being a person, and identifying
what is most required to allow that to unfold. Where one is provided the ability to just be.

But what if what one has come to consider home is not a place of safety? That there is no setting where one feels secure? What then becomes home, if that understanding of place and self, is altered, distorted, removed, or disappears?

How then does one find equilibrium?

This exhibition is an exploration of that sense of displacement that occurs when home is altered, and of the redefinition that takes place as a result. The works contained in this project consider how community can be retained, reconstructed, or altered, both physically and psychologically. And how one is able to determine and define self within that experience of loss that occurs with displacement; how one reconsiders what has been perhaps most consistent in identity, a setting where security and safety were once perceived to exist, if even just as an illusion.

To determine how, with movement and reexamination of self, there can be a new memory of place, which is able to foster and expand what can be known as home.

Amir Guberstein is a visual artist living in New York. Born in 1985 in Israel, Guberstein received both the BFA and MFA from the University of Arts Berlin. He has been included in group exhibitions in Bergen, Norway, where he was in residency at Flaggfabriken in 2014; Taipei, Taiwan; Miami, FL; Denver, CO; and as part of Visual AIDS in NY. His work is in the collection of the Soho House in Istanbul, Turkey.

Kirsten Leenaars is a multidisciplinary artist residing and teaching in Chicago. A faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Leenaars is originally from the Netherlands, where she was born in 1976. She received her BFA from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, a MA in Fine Arts from the Piet Zwart Institute’s Post Graduate Program in Rotterdam, connected with Plymouth University in the UK, and a MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago. Leenaars has shown alone and in group exhibitions through the United States, Mexico, Europe, and Turkey, including most recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Jeroen Nelemans is a multidisciplinary artist living in Chicago. Born in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, in 1974, Nelemans obtained his BFA from Florida International University in Miami and a MFA in Fibers from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nelemans is represented by The Mission, Chicago, and has had solo and group exhibitions of his work across the United States and Europe, including the Elmhurst Art Museum, the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and the De La Cruz Collection in Miami.

Sanaz Sohrabi is a multidisciplinary artist. She resides in Chicago. Born in Tehran, Iran in 1988, Sohrabi received a BFA from the University of Tehran and MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Sohrabi was a resident with the Chicago Artists Coalition’s BOLT Program, Ragdale Foundation, and ACRE in 2014, in Vermont in 2015, and is currently a resident with the Est-Nord Est program in Quebec. She has shown widely in Chicago, including the Evanston Biennial, Comfort Station, ARC Gallery, and 6018 North Gallery.

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Tags: Amir Guberstein, Chicago, Displacement, Jeroen Nelemans, Kirsten Leenaars, Sanaz Sohrabi, Scott Hunter, South of the Tracks, West Garfield Park