Please note: This is an online exhibition, as the galleries at MSVU Art Gallery continue to be closed to the public until further notice.
The COVID-19 pandemic, now approaching its first full year in Canada, has radically centered home as the site of daily life. The question of home (namely “what and where is home?”) is made no simpler by this fact. Indeed, this crisis has exacerbated existing inequalities and precarity in housing access. Co-opting the language of public health directives to stay home and shelter in place, Tactics for Staying Home in Uncertain Times invites viewers to consider the meanings of home through the lens of diaspora. This exhibition asks, how do we stay home when home is away? How do we make here feel like home?
Tactics brings together five emerging Black, Indigenous and racialized (BIPOC) artists living across Canada whose works articulate ideas of displacement, domesticity, and the limits of belonging. By tracing connections to present and past homes, the artists render visible everyday gestures that enable feelings of belonging and solidarity across complex and diverse communities. The featured works borrow from the fabric of lived experience: familiar fruit, objects of utility and comfort, the light of an electronic screen. In recreating a domestic space that is unique and yet familiar, Tactics reveals common ground on their shared experience of making home in times of global crisis. The exhibition includes work by rudi aker, Cinthia Arias Auz, Michelle Campos Castillo, Bishara Elmi, and Camila Salcedo.